Me vs. the proverbs: the absurd and outdated

Being a Virgo has certainly started to take its toll on me. I don’t really believe in star signs especially the ones sold to innocent people desperate for encouragement, but I do believe in the possibility of people born in a particular month sharing particular character traits. That’s what the world does. It gets God’s work and finds a way to make it a more “celestial” way to explain it to humans. Belonging to Virgo leaves me an active thinker, I always debate anything before it settles in my head, and sometimes it occurs deep in my subconscious without my consent, the English proverbs inclusive.

   
 Here is my problem, these proverbs are to be taken literally, and yet we live in a practical world, and secondly most of them were intended for minority groups, in minority situations, and lastly times change, some are just outdated.

       Curiosity killed the cat;

The proverb everyone has used once at least in their life. It is a warning for people not to poke into things that do not concern them. But really let’s think about it, how would you know what concerns you and what doesn’t if you are clueless about what is being discussed? And even worse, if you are clueless about what is being discussed behind your   back, how do you decide what concerns you and what dosen't? How sure are you the people discussing behind your back are not planning to kill you, would it hurt to ask the scary guy in the dark alley if he had any evil plans that night before passing by him? No! Would it hurt to ask the Grim Reaper what he’s doing in your car seat when driving down a dark road high on alcohol? No! So why would someone ask another person to stop asking questions about things that their brain doesn’t fathom?
     My theory: This proverb is not fully a fact; ironically it only applies to people who have lost their sense of curiosity. And all that time without practice has left them armatures at the art of asking questions. And the only time they try to ask them, they literally die from curiosity.

Case solved: Curiosity killed the wrong cat and I have the world’s greatest genius to prove my theory

    Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

For this experiment, you will need a lion, a jaguar and a leopard and a blue room. Yes blue is the color for dramatic effect. Then place them into the same room and drop in the fattest goat you can find, and see how much 3 enemies living together is a bad idea.

Case solved: keep your harmless enemies close, and your harmful friends closer.

      The pen is mightier than the sword

I’m done listening to literal meanings, I bet the exaggeration in our daily speech is the reason the world's  scientists have not yet found the key to its biggest mysteries, nuclear fusion inclusive. First of all we live in the era of facebook and emails.  Countries have literally gone to war over one president not accepting the other's request or a mere follow back, and now you tell me a pen is mightier than a sword. Go back to the blue room, hopefully the lion is still alive, bruised, but alive, on the ground is a pen and sword, let's see which one you pick. For your sake i really hope you do not pick the pen.

Case solved: the sword is mightier than the pen, but once in a while the pen will get lucky and cause more damage or prevent it.

      A picture is worth more than a thousand words

I wrote a special poem for this one;

STEVE: the idiot

Steve was leading a rebellion.

Marching day and night into oblivion.

Steve wanted to inspire his army,

Show them a picture of a stash of gold he did,

Steve died alone on the battlefield
      By Lincoln Nidoi

Case solved: a picture is worth more than ten words

      Necessity is the mother of invention.

The key to the madness in this proverb is in my previous blog post.

Case solved: Laziness is the mother of necessity and invention, they are siblings, (the father being boredom but he doesn’t like to be associated with his kids very much, so let’s leave him out of this)

     Good things come to those who wait

I see what this proverb implies but I just do not see how this applies to all situations. First of all you can wait for a phone call from the lottery team and your land lord calls instead, and the most likely probability is you can wait for your pen to turn into an airplane and you will die before seeing it happen.(for all those who have ever got bored in class with only a pen and creativity at their hands)

Case solved: good things will come to those who wait wisely

And finally the biggest lie of them all;

       Practice makes perfect

No one can ever be perfect. To prove this theory we are going to have to go in the opposite direction, let’s say you are practicing to write with both hands accurately, and the pen slips on one side forming a crescent , perfection would not mean never making this mistake again, perfection would be making the same mistake two more times, the first time (second time) being coincidence, the second time (third time) being perfection

Case closed: practice makes … (am still thinking about this one)

And so as you can see, a good number of the proverbs we use are either outdated, absurd or apppeal to the minority today, and thus “I will none of their usage, this day forth...”

PS: I am right on all counts and I have a 2,000 paged Oxford Dictionary plus a dead genius to prove it!