Prospero | Johnson: Aphorisms

Short and too sweet

Short, memorable and poetic, many aphorisms and pieces of advice are also flat wrong

By R.L.G.

“DON’T use anything you can’t pronounce,” Johnson read recently about shampoos. The writer was making a pitch in favour of natural oils, and against those shampoos whose main ingredient was sodium lauryl sulfate. The advice seems at first like good old-fashioned wisdom. But on second thought, I realise I can in fact pronounce “sodium lauryl sulfate”.

A related saying is “Don’t eat anything you can’t pronounce.” This, again, seems to be good sense. If an ingredients list includes a lot of long chemical names, the food is probably highly processed, so far from its natural state that it has little nutrition, and may actually do harm. But the same kind of people who say, “Don’t eat anything you can’t pronounce,” also tout a host of unusual comestibles discovered recently by foodie Westerners: jicama, seitan, tempeh, açaí, acerola, goji, kombucha and so on. Strictly following “don’t eat what you can’t pronounce” would leave most of the West eating more cake than quinoa.

Short, memorable sayings have an appeal. Researchers have even found that unfamiliar aphorisms that rhyme (“what sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals”) are more persuasive than others with identical meaning but no rhyme (“what sobriety conceals, alcohol unmasks”). The brain craves ideas that can be understood and remembered without effort. Other devices that can make a proverb or a bit of homespun wisdom easily understood and remembered include rhythm, brevity, alliteration and metaphor.

But what happens when memorable advice is bad? “To thine own self be true” is terrible counsel for many people, as Shakespeare himself realised. “If you want something done right, do it yourself” applies only to those things you are already good at. A watched pot will boil. Not everything is fair in love and war.

Some of these are poetic, meant only to remind of basic truths, not to be taken literally. But some proverbs and advice are bad from end to end. “Live each day like it’s your last” is a great way to live an impoverished, unhealthy and short life. (“Stop and smell the roses” is a more sensible reminder.)“It’s always darkest before the dawn” can only have been coined by someone who had never stayed up all night. And it is hard to think of a misunderstanding much worse than “great minds think alike.” (Arthur Schopenhauer did better: “Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”)

Memorable prose is, of course, a good thing. But Orwell was wrong when he claimed that short words and sentences would always make falsehoods plain. Real demagogues and charismatic dictators are more subtle than “War is peace.” Populists succeed by making things from the debatable to the dodgy seem obvious. In contrast, some arguments require counterintuitive steps. The Economist thinks drugs are harmful, but should be legal, a position hard to compress into a slogan the length of Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no.”

So beware the seductiveness of poetry. The authors of a paper on rhyming aphorisms (“Birds of a feather flock conjointly: rhyme as reason in aphorisms”, by Matthew McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh) found that the spell of memorable rhymes can be broken. When a group of subjects was told to distinguish poetic qualities from underlying semantic content, the difference in trust between rhymed and unrhymed slogans narrowed.

Johnny Cochran defended O.J. Simpson, an American-football star, from charges of murdering Mr Simpson’s former wife and her friend. A bloody glove found at the crime scene looked uncomfortably small when Mr Simpson tried it on in court (pictured). Mr Cochran told the jury, in the trial’s most famous moment, “If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.” They did. But the sceptical reader might want to commit this dictum to memory: “If too tight the rhetorical fit, beware the stench of manure.”

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