Should auld acquaintance — and 2017 — be forgot?

THE AULD FAMILIAR LINES: “Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? We’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet, For auld lang syne.”        Robert Burns (1759-1796)        Scottish poet        The best known lines from his poem “Auld Lang Syne” (1788), which actually mean that old acquaintances should not be forgotten, they should be remembered and thought of fondly.         These lines were popularized by Guy Lombardo's musical version, but most people can’t remember the rest of the lyrics. In case you want to have them on hand on New Year’s Eve or read the backstory on the poem and the song, see this post on my This Day in Quotes site.

THE GOOD RIDDANCE TO 2017 VERSION: “Should 2017 be forgot and never brought to mind?...To start it off right we hired a buffalo chicken drummy that fell into a pile of cat hair to be the captain of the ship. Ok, yes! We let the people around us feel like second-class citizens and inhuman. We let families and children and POC and women wonder if anyone gives a shit about them or if all along we’ve been pretending at some semblance of openness and equality. Great, sounds good! And that was only in January alone! There isn’t enough time in well hey, a year, to write about how it only continued to get more wonderful from there. It was like a scene from a movie after a bomb goes off and everyone wanders around the charred landscape while pieces of burnt wood fall from on high and embers rain from the sky. Just when you thought one more bad thing couldn’t happen, somebody finds a hidden landmine and the whole thing just goes up in smoke again.”        Quinn Angelique        American blogger        Expressing what many people feel about 2017 in a post on the Medium website, December 26, 2017

MICKEY ROONEY’S FAIR WEATHER FRIENDS VERSION: “What bothers me are friends, or perhaps acquaintances, who in rough times turn out to be non-acquaintances. I'm going to write a song about their approach. You probably know the melody:    Should non-acquaintance be forgot    And never brought to mind    Should non-acquaintance be forgot    Or kicked in their behind?”        Mickey Rooney (1920-2014)        American actor        In his book I.E. An Autobiography (1965)

THE TOTAL ABSTINENCE COUNTERQUOTE: “Let drinking customs be forgot And never brought to mind. Come, moderate drinkers, topers, sots, And leave your cups behind.”        Henry Lee (1911-1993)        American journalist and author                      Quoting an old Temperance Movement song in his book How Dry We Were: Prohibition Revisited (1963)

THE ODDLY ANTI-ABSTINENCE TEMPERANCE SONG: “Can abstinence be now forgot, And never brought to mind? Can abstinence be now forgot, And mercy to mankind.”        Lyrics from the song “Poured Out By Hands Divine,” in The Standard Book of Song for Temperance Meetings (1883)

THE JANUARY 1st, MORNING AFTER MEME: “Your new, bed-related acquaintances should probably be forgot, and never brought to mind. Not that you remember them anyway.”         New Year's meme created by WildRumpus on the SomeCards.com site

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“Know thyself.” (And thy enemy.)

  

FAMOUS MAXIM OF THE GREEK SAGES: “Know thyself.” (“Gnothi seauton.”)        A saying inscribed at the Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi (4th century BC)                     This oft-quoted advice is generally attributed to “The Seven Sages of Greece,” a group of famous Greek philosophers, statesmen and politicians. It’s one of 147 pithy sayings inscribed at Delphi.                     Some of those sayings have been attributed to specific sages. For example, “Know thyself” has been credited to the philosopher Thales, the Greek statesman Solon, and several other Greek wise men.        However, it’s likely that it and many other maxims inscribed at the Temple of Delphi are proverbial sayings that predate the Seven Sages.

THE CHINESE SAGE’S VERSION: “He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.”                     One of the most-cited quotes from the Tao Te Ching (a.k.a. the  Daodejing or Dao De Jing), a fundamental text of Taoism dating back to the 6th Century BC        This quote is traditionally attributed to Lao-Tzu (a.k.a.  Lao-Tze or Laozi), the legendary, possibly mythical founder of Taoism who is generally credited with authorship of the Tao Te Ching.          Modern scholars tend to believe that text is probably a compilation of ancient Chinese wisdom, rather than the creation of one man.

THE CHINESE GENERAL’S VERSION: “Know your enemy and know yourself, find naught in fear for 100 battles. Know yourself but not your enemy, find level of loss and victory. Know thy enemy but not yourself, wallow in defeat every time.”         Sun-Tzu (c. 544 BC-496 BC)         Chinese general, military strategist, and philosopher                      This is one of the most popular pieces of wisdom in his famed work The Art of War (5th century BC).         Although “Know thy enemy” and the variation “Know thine enemy” sound like and are sometimes assumed to be Biblical in origin, there is no such quote in the Bible. (Check it yourself if you don’t believe me.)

“POOR RICHARD’S” OBSERVATION: “There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.”        Benjamin Franklin (1705-1790)        American author, inventor, writer, publisher and statesman        A saying recorded the 1750 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack, a yearly almanac published by Franklin under the pseudonym of “Poor Richard” Saunders.

A BRIT WIT’S COUNTERQUOTE: “Only the shallow know themselves.”        Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)        Irish poet and playwright        From his collection of aphorisms “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” first published in December 1894 in the one and only issue of the Oxford student magazine The Chameleon.

A FRENCH WRITER’S COUNTERQUTE: “‘Know Thyself’ – a maxim as pernicious as it is odious. A person observing himself would arrest his own development. Any caterpillar who tried to ‘know himself’ would never become a butterfly.”        André Gide (1869-1951)        French writer and left-leaning political activist        A comment in his 1935 book Les Nouvelles Nourritures, meaning “The New Foods” in English. That rambling, part-philosophical, part-poetic, part-political work is a followup to Gide’s Les Nourritures Terrestres, or “Foods of the Earth,” (1897).

HENRY MILLER’S DARK VIEW: “The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself.”        Henry Miller (1891-1980)        American writer best known for his boundary-pushing, semi-autobiographical novels                     A line from his memoir The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945), an account of a year-long trip he took across the United States in 1939 after living in Paris for nearly a decade.         After the quote above, Miller goes on to say: “All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you. The source of it is God whom you place outside, above and beyond. Crime is identification, first with God, then with your own image.” For fun, also see the video riff on “Know thyself” that I posted on YouTube.

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“Victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.”

  

THE QUOTE THAT POPULARIZED THE SAYING: “There’s and old saying that victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.”        John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)        American Democratic politician; 35th President of the United States                     His widely-cited comment at a press conference on April 21, 1961 that helped popularize the saying in the U.S.        This was part of Kennedy’s response to a question journalist Sander Vanocor asked about the recent, failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in Cuba. Kennedy gained credibility by acknowledging that, although the C.I.A., American military officials, and many anti-Castro Cubans were involved in planning the operation, he had approved it and accepted the ultimate responsibility for its failure.        According to a letter JFK’s advisor Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. sent to language maven William Safire, Kennedy didn’t recall where he’d heard the saying. However, as Safire and other quotation researchers have noted, it’s likely that Kennedy got it from watching the 1951 movie about German General Erwin Rommel, The Desert Fox.        In the film, scripted by Nunally Johnson, Nazi Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt (played by actor Leo G. Carroll), says to Rommel (actor James Mason): “You must never forget this, my dear fellow: victory has a hundred fathers, defeat is an orphan.”        Nunally adapted the line from a quote recoded in the 1950 book the film was based on, Rommel: The Desert Fox by Desmond Young. In the book, Young notes that on September 9, 1942, Count Gian Galeazzo Ciano, the son-in-law and Foreign Minister of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, wrote in his diary: “Victory always finds a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.”        Some reference books about proverbs suggest that Ciano may have been using or paraphrasing an existing proverbial saying. It is sometimes given as “Victory has a thousand fathers…”

THE SUCKY BASEBALL TEAM VARIATION: “The Giants are bad. You might have heard...It is said that victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan. I am proud to report that the Giants’ misery is unlikely ever to see the inside of the great baseball orphanage. An entire, many-armed-and-legged village of Suck has raised the 2017 Giants; there are so many sources of horror that it is difficult to choose which one to consider after any given loss.”        Claire McNear        Staff writer for the sports and entertainment website TheRinger.com        In a June 27, 2017 post about the San Francisco Giants mind-bogglingly horrible season

THE SUCKY MOVIE VARIATION: “It’s been said that victory has a hundred fathers but failure is an orphan, and in a way the reverse is true of true story narratives. When they suck there’s blame to go around and a million causes — the unearned creative liberties, the important points unfairly omitted, the obvious elements unnecessarily fussed over. When they’re good it seems preordained, as if God told the story and all you had to do was write it down.”        Vince Mancini        American writer, comedian, podcaster and movie critic        In his review of the 2017 movie Battle of the Sexes on the Uproxx.com website. (He put it in the “good” true story narratives category.)

THE BUSINESS FAILURE VARIATION: “It’s never hard to collect candidates to take credit for success...The flip side of that, though, is that failure is not an orphan. Companies that have a culture of blame and denial eventually go down in flames.”        Matt Blumberg        American technology and marketing entrepreneur and writer        An observation he makes in his book Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business (2013)

THE POLICY FAILURE APPLICATION: “As many have claimed, every successful policy idea has a hundred mothers and fathers; every bad idea is an orphan.”        Donald E. Abelson        Professor & Chair of the Western University Political Science at Western university in Ontario, Canada        In the book The Myth of the Sacred: The Charter, the Courts, and the Politics of the Constitution in Canada (2002)

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“What does not kill me makes me stronger” – from Nietzsche and The Donald to Miley and Conan…

NIETZSCHE’S FAMOUS MAXIM: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” (“Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker.”)        Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)        German philosopher and poet        In the “Maxims and Arrows” section of his book Twilight of the Idols (1888)        This famous line by Nietzsche has been translated and paraphrased in various ways, often with Whatever or That which in place of the word What, doesn’t instead of does not, and destroy or some other verb in place of kill. Nietzsche used a similar line in Ecce Homo (written 1888, published 1908), the last book he wrote before going completely insane. In the chapter of Ecce Homo titled “Why I Am So Wise,” he wrote that a person who has “turned out well” could be recognized by certain attributes, such as a knack for exploiting bad accidents to his advantage. Regarding such a man, Nietzsche said: “What does not kill him makes him stronger.” (“Was ihn nicht umbringt, macht ihn stärker.”)

THE DONALD TRUMP MAXIM: “What doesn’t kill Trump makes him stronger. And louder.”        Sarah Rense        Assistant Editor at Esquire magazine        In a post about FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly's feud with Donald Trump on the Esquire.com website. (Cartoon by Tom Stiglich, TomStiglich.com.)

THE MILEY CYRUS MAXIM: “In our celebrity-obsessed culture, whatever outrageous act doesn’t manage to kill a celebrity’s career simply makes them a bigger celebrity.”         Comment posted by “JohnnyYuma” on the ABC News story about Miley Cyrus and her “twerking” performance on the August 2013 MTV Video Music Awards show

MEL’S STRENGTH-THROUGH-HUMILIATION SYSTEM: “You ask anybody what their number one fear is and it’s public humiliation. Multiply that on a global scale and that’s what I've been through. It changes you and makes you one tough motherf**ker. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It’s really that simple.”        Mel Gibson         In a January 2010 interview in The Telegraph         Commenting on what he learned after the publicity flap over his 2006 arrest for DUI and the anti-Semitic remarks he made to the cops who arrested him. Mel told The Telegraph the incident had a positive effect on his life and he had learned from his mistakes. The interview came out before his highly-publicized, ranting attacks on his former girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, which made Mel even stronger (and even less marketable as an actor).

THE JOKER’S VARIATION: “I believe whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you stranger.”        Heath Ledger, as the Batman villain The Joker, in the movie The Dark Knight (2008)

ANGELINA’S VARIATION: “quod me nutrit   me destruit.”        Latin saying tattooed on Angelina Jolie’s lower abdomen        In English, it means “What nourishes me also destroys me.”

THE SCREW YOU VERSION: “Whatever hurts you makes me stronger.”          Leslie Stefanson, as the character Capt. Elisabeth Campbell, in the movie The General’s Daughter (1999)

THE SHARED PHILOSPHY OF CONAN AND CLAIREE: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”        Quote shown at the beginning of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Conan the Barbarian (1982) and also used as a quip by Clairee Belcher (actress Olympia Dukakis) in the movie Steel Magnolias (1989).

Here’s a link to another Quote/Counterquote post with variations on Nietzsche’s famous maxim.

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“The squeaky wheel get the grease”

THE OLD (MIS)ATTRIBUTED SAYING: “I hate to be a kicker, I always long for peace, But the wheel that does the squeaking is the one that gets the grease.”        Attributed to Josh Billings (1818-1885)        American humorist            The 1937 edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations attributed these lines to Billings, the pen name of Henry Wheeler Shaw, and claimed they came from a poem he wrote around 1870 called “The Kicker.” (In the 1800s, kicker was a slang term for someone who complained a lot.) The attribution to Billings was accepted and repeated for many years. So was the suggestion that the poem was the origin of the saying “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” an idiom that means the most noticeable problems or loudest complainers are most likely to get attention and be fixed or placated. (Sometimes given as “The squeaky wheel gets the oil.”)                     Modern quote mavens, like Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, have found no proof that Billings wrote any such poem. It does not appear in any of his published works.        As noted in a post by Garson O’Toole on his Quote Investigator site, the earliest documented appearance of the squeaky wheel idiom is in a collection of stories by vaudeville performer and author Cal Stewart published in 1903, titled Uncle Josh Weathersby’s “Punkin Centre” Stories. In that book, Stewart attributes the following epigram to his character Josh Weathersby:                “I don’t believe in kickin’,               It aint apt to bring one peace;               But the wheel what squeaks the loudest               Is the one what gets the grease.”        I think it’s likely that the linguistic concept of squeaky wheels getting greased predates Stewart and Billings. What is certain is that uses and variations of it continue to this day.

PETER’S RULE: “The squeaky wheel gets replaced.”        Peter H. Diamandis                     Greek American engineer, physician, and entrepreneur        In his book How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (2015)        This is one of the principles Diamandis calls “Peter’s Laws: The Creed for the Sociopathic Obsessive Compulsive” in the book.

OTEP’S OBSERVATION: “You know just because the majority thinks something is right, doesn’t make it right. So, it is up to us, the people that see the wrong, that see the injustice, that stay educated, stay informed, stay involved. And there’s an old phrase ‘the squeaky wheel gets the oil.’ Right now, our wheels aren’t very squeaky; the other side, they’re the ones making all the racket...We just have to get up, stand up, speak out, and don’t be silent.”        Otep Shamaya        Heavy metal musician and liberal activist        In an interview posted in 2009 on the now defunct site TheScreamQueen.com

A FAULTY POLITICAL PREDICTION: “Folks, the squeaky wheel of activist conservatism and American populism might be getting the grease (i.e., a lot of media attention) right now, but when election time comes the buzz and passion of a new movement will matter less than appealing to the widest group of voters possible with the most credible candidate possible.”        John Tantillo        American marketing consultant and columnist for Fox News          A comment he made about political trends during the 2010 election, in a post on the Fox News website. Given the results of the 2016 presidential election, Tantillo’s prediction seems faulty in more ways than one.

THE JAPANESE VARIATION: “Whereas Americans believe, ‘The squeaky wheel gets the grease’ (so it’s best to speak up), the Japanese say, ‘The nail that sticks out gets hammered back in’ (so it’s best to remain silent if you don’t want to be hit on the head).”         Deborah Tannen          American professor of linguistics and author        In her book Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work (1994)

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"Don’t Worry, Be Happy" (Just Slap Me!)

THE SAYING MADE FAMOUS BY BABA & BOBBY: “Don’t worry, be happy.”                     First popularized by Meher Baba (1894-1969); made even more famous by Bobby McFerrin                      “Don’t worry, be happy” is a catchphrase used by Indian spiritual master Meher Baba and featured on his posters and “inspiration cards” in the mid-1960s.        Baba probably coined the saying. But it achieved far wider fame after being borrowed as the title and chorus of the 1988 song written by McFerrin, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” McFerrin’s original recording was a huge hit, becoming the first a cappella song to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It has since been covered by many other musicians and bands.        Most people now know (and either love or hate) the song, which starts with the following lyrics:               Here's a little song I wrote                            You might want to sing it note for note               Don’t worry, be happy               In every life we have some trouble               But when you worry you make it double               Don’t worry, be happy                     Don’t worry, be happy now

PUBLIC ENEMY’S COUNTERQUOTE: “Don’t worry be happy Was a number one jam Damn, if I say it you can slap me right here”        Public Enemy        Pioneering American hip hop group formed in 1986                     This was Public Enemy’s mocking response to Bobby McFerrin’s feel-good hit “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” in the lyrics of their song “Fight the Power.” The original version of the song was on the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing. A second version was featured on Public Enemy's 1990 studio album Fear of a Black Planet.

PUTIN’S PARIS DISAGREEMENT PLATITUDE: “Don't worry, be happy...This accord has not yet come into effect; it is supposed to come into effect as of 2021…so we still have time. If we are all constructive in what we do, there are things that we can agree on.”        Vladimir Putin                     President of Russia                     This was Putin’s widely-quoted response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw United States from the Paris Climate Change Accord, an agreement to reduce the use of fossil fuels to mitigate the global warming.        Putin himself had two reasons not to worry. For him, Trump’s decision was a win-win, since it made the U.S. look bad and because Russia is the third biggest oil producing country in the world (slightly behind the U.S. and Saudi Arabia).

THE GRUMPY VERSION: “Don’t Worry, Be Grumpy”        Ajahn Brahm                    Australian Buddhist teacher and writer        The title of a book he published in 2015, subtitled “Inspiring Stories for Making the Most of Each Moment.” I wonder if it sold better than his earlier book “Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties.”

THE CRABBY VERSION : “Don’t Worry, Be Crabby”        The motto of Crabby Bill’s        A Florida-based chain of seafood restaurants

A WORSE VERSION: “Don’t Worry, It Gets Worse”        Alida Nugent        American writer and actress        The title of Nugent’s book about what she describes in the subtitle as her “(Mostly Failed) Attempts at Adulthood.”

THE NATTY DREADLOCKS VERSION: “Don’t Worry, Be NAPPY!”       Jeffery Bradley       American author and Internet entrepreneur       The title of his book about “maintaining and living with dreadlocks, a hairstyle that most in American society consider impractical.” (Alas, a hairstyle that for me is impossible, as much as I’d love to have dreads.)

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