In With the Old

You can't judge a book by it's cover.
That's putting the cart before the horse.
One in the hand is worth two in the bush.

We're undergoing a silent crisis of culture. This viral attack is brought about mostly by laziness and these common phrases. They are automated responses to complex situations - and they make sense. They are so prevalent in our lingua franca that I've heard at least one of them every day for the entire week. I even heard the one about books and their covers three times since Sunday. So if they do their job so well that they've become cliche, what's the problem?

We need new ones.

These old ones are so boring and trite. And besides, why shouldn't we be making our own aphorisms? Why shouldn't we cast aside the sayings of old in place of fresher sounding tidbits of wisdom? I'd be willing to bet that the people who originally started spreading these saying are all dead and buried, so I doubt they will care much if we replace their legacy.

The challenge, as I see it, is that 1) the sayings are so common and B) they work so well. They explain things so succinctly, and maybe that's the sickening part about them. I have an aversion to letting ancient, dead people tell me how to live my life. Maybe I can judge a book by its cover, and the old farts who first enlisted this sage catch-phrase were too dull to. Maybe we've risen above them.

But even if we haven't, we should reword them in our image. Recast the die. We shouldn't just sit back complacent and say, "Well that aphorism issue's been taken care of. Who wants ice cream?" Besides, we can always get ice cream after we come up with new phrases.

Here are some possible replacements:

You can't judge a movie by its trailer.
If you stereotype things, you're an idiot.
You can't make a value-assessment concerning a collection of words based solely upon the frontal decorations of their encasement.

Are these any good? Of course not. But they are a start. The point is that we need to shuffle off the cobwebs of the past (when's the last time you saw a ton of horse-drawn carts crowing the streets?). We shouldn't sit idly by and allow our ancestors to speak for us - or even to phrase thoughts that we agree with for us. Besides, some of these sayings aren't even true (see: An apple a day keeps the doctor away. It doesn't. Trust me.)

We need new lessons for our time, and new dressings for the old ones. We need phrases that will pertain to us in a dynamic, significant way. Imagine a few generations from now when a father tells a son, "Aren't you putting the cart before the horse?" and the son replies, "Dad, what the hell is a cart?" This is an inevitability. There may even come a day when children have to be told what horses were. The future is not static, after all.

My first thought email was one line: Life is not something to be taken lightly.

I feel like that might be a good candidate for a new aphorism. I imagine the day, several years from now, when a daughter approaches here mother while she's reprogramming the dish-washer-robot to speed dry, and she'll say, "Mother, I feel like sitting around all day inside instead of going out to play with my friends," and the mother will say, "Why Andromeda-5, you should take every opportunity to have an adventure. Life isn't something to be taken lightly, you know."

I also imagine that the little girl will mouth the last few words of the statement, having heard it so many times. Plus, Andromeda-5 is sort of a brat, I bet.