GUEST COLUMN on folklore adages

Will Rogers inspires recollections of    
                                   childhood sayings
                                             by Lew Taylor

         Will Rogers is famous for a number of his activities, not the least of which is his origin of quotable sound bites of encapsulated wisdom. One of the most quoted, “I never met a man I didn’t like,” can be a source of wonder and dispute. Another one of my favorites: “The trouble is, we know so many things that ain’t so.”

         History has proved him right on that one, but it set me to wondering about the things we knew in my youth that seem to have no basis in fact. We knew those things with a certainty, and since there was no one to dispute them around in our mountain home at the head of the creek, they must have been true; at least in those days as far as we were concerned.

         Take, for instance, “If a turtle bites you, he won’t let go until it thunders.” Now, on our trips we often caught turtles of various types and sizes. Since getting the hook out of the mouth of a turtle could be risky, we frequently cut the hook off the line before we dispatched him with a rock.
         Thus, we never knew anyone who tested the premise; that is, no one we knew was ever bitten by a turtle—which was good, because it could be a long time between thunderstorms.

          Another, while we’re on the creek bank. “Snakes won’t or can’t, bite under water.” Thus we confidently waded the streams known to harbor water snakes of two or three kinds, knowing we could see them swimming toward us on the surface and beat them off. And, of course, they did not pose a danger under water.
         Never mind that the Dawkins boy was bitten on one toe wading Big Cedar Creek. He must have stepped on its head, because snakes don’t bite under water. No one thought to ask how they caught the fish and frogs on which they thrived. It was just reassuring to know they don’t bite under water.

          Another well-known fact in our mountain home was that eating fish and drinking milk at the same meal would make us sick. How we came to know that I cannot surmise, but no one at our house ever ate fish and drank milk at the same meal. None of us got sick afterward. That was all the proof one should need for that wisdom.

         Of course, a lot of our quotes to live by from my childhood proved themselves valuable. One of those wise pieces of advice, “Let sleeping dogs lie,” proved its worth in some way almost every day.

        Some sayings have passed into cliché, or common folk lore. “Don’t take any wooden nickels.” I had no problem with that one, as I do not recall seeing any wooden nickels, although there must be some historical event that gave rise to it.

        “Not enough room to swing a cat by the tail without getting fur in your mouth” always sounded like good advice, too, but I never saw anyone try to swing a cat by the tail in a larger space to check the need for the adage.

        The real gems from childhood, though, were all the things we knew that weren’t so.   

        Will Rogers was more than a pretty trick roper.

 Lew Taylor is retired from the Foreign Service and is a poet living in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

c 2012 by  Lew Taylor and Pat Laster dba lovepat press