Neverisms Page 6

  three

  Never Give Advice Unless Asked

  Advice

  On January 24, 2005, William Safire wrote his final op-ed column for the New York Times. It had been thirty-two years since the former Nixon-Agnew speechwriter was asked to lend his voice to what he called “the liberal chorus” of the newspaper (one critic of the newspaper’s decision to hire Safire said that it was like setting a hawk loose among the doves). From 1973 to 2005, Safire wrote more than three thousand biweekly columns, winning the admiration of conservatives and the ire of liberals for speaking his mind and pulling no punches.

  He also earned the respect of word and language lovers worldwide for his “On Language” column, which ran in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine from 1979 until his death in 2009 at age seventy-nine. For three decades, Safire built an immense fan base who treasured his weekly excursions into the origins of words, the meanings of phrases, and the role that language plays in our lives.

  Safire would have agreed with Kingsley Amis, who said, “If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.” In fact, he often said he enjoyed the indignation his columns aroused, once writing: “The most successful column is one that causes the reader to throw down the paper in a peak of fit.” (And yes, that was Safire’s clever way of tweaking fit of pique).

  In 1996, during what came to be known as “Travelgate,” First Lady Hillary Clinton denied any role in the firing of a number of White House travel agents. Most Washington insiders took her denial with a grain of salt, considering it a standard political denial and not a binding oath. Not Safire, however. He called Mrs. Clinton “a congenital liar.” At a press briefing a few days later, a reporter asked White House press secretary Mike McCurry how the president felt about Safire’s characterization of the first lady. McCurry began by calling the article “an outrageous political attack” and then described his boss’s reaction this way:

  The President, if he were not the President, would have delivered

  a more forceful response on the bridge of Mr. Safire’s nose.

  McCurry quickly added that the president “knows he can’t possibly do such a thing.” A few days later, Safire—ever the language maven—said he thoroughly approved of the way McCurry had phrased his original conditional statement.

  Safire’s final op-ed column in 2005 was given a simple but compelling title: “Never Retire!” In the column, written when he was seventy-five, Safire said he was soon to become chairman of the Dana Foundation, which supports research in neuroscience, immunology, and brain disorders. His decision to continue working rather than retire was based on a piece of advice he had received a few years earlier from the 1962 Nobel laureate James Watson:

  Never retire. Your brain needs exercise or it will atrophy.

  Urging readers “to think about a longevity strategy,” Safire recommended that they lay the foundation for later endeavors while in the midst of their careers:The trick is to start early in our careers the stress-relieving avocation that we will need later as a mind-exercising final vocation. We can quit a job, but we quit fresh involvement at our mental peril.

  Safire’s advice dovetails perfectly with what gerontology experts have long recommended. In 1998, David Mahoney and Richard Restak came out with The Longevity Strategy: How to Live to be 100 Using the Brain-Body Connection. The two men distilled years of neuroscience research into thirty-one recommendations designed to increase longevity. Of their many helpful tips, one stands out:

  Never retire.

  To paraphrase Winston Churchill: Never, never, never retire.

  Change careers, do something entirely different, but never retire.

  The advice of these aging experts was echoed by Mel Brooks a year later. In a Modern Maturity interview, the seventy-two-year-old show business legend also said “Never retire,” but he gave the warning his own inimitable spin:Do what you do and keep doing it. But don’t do it on Friday. Take Friday off. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, do fishing, do sexual activities, watch Fred Astaire movies. Then from Monday to Thursday, do what you’ve been doing all your life, unless it’s lifting bags of potatoes off the back of a truck. I mean, after eighty-five that’s hard to do. My point is: live fully and don’t retreat.

  When people offer advice, especially when they consider the advice important, they often choose to express themselves in the strongest possible way: always do this or never do that. You will recall from the introductory chapter that a strongly worded directive to always do something is called an exhortation, while one to never do something is called a dehortation. In this chapter, we’ll focus our attention exclusively on dehortative advice. And much of that advice, like Safire’s never retire headline, has been delivered in only two or three words:

  Never procrastinate.LORD CHESTERFIELD (Philip Dormer Stanhope)

  Never argue.BENJAMIN DISRAELI

  Never imitate.RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  Never despair.

  (In Latin, nil desperandum .)HORACE (first century B.C.)

  Never neglect details.COLIN POWELL

  Never prejudge anybody.NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF

  Not all dehortations begin with the word never, but those that do stand out. “This is an especially important recommendation,” they seem to say, “so pay attention!” This kind of admonitory advice shows up with a special frequency in the world of manners and social etiquette. In her 1922 classic Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, Emily Post wrote that the first rule of etiquette, and the one upon which all others were based, was:

  Never do anything that is unpleasant to others.

  In Post’s view, all of the specific rules of etiquette “merely paraphrase or explain or elaborate” upon this overarching principle. She offered a host of elaborations in her book, many expressed in what grammarians describe as a passive voice:

  A gentleman should never take his hat off with a flourish.

  A lady never asks a gentleman to dance, or to go to supper with her.

  Elbows are never put on the table while one is eating.

  By contrast, she also offered many pronouncements in an active voice. And when she wrote in this way, her rules truly commanded our attention:

  Never lose your temper.

  Never say “Au revoir” unless you have been talking French,

  or are speaking to a French person.

  Never take more than your share—

  whether of the road in driving your car,

  of chairs on a boat or seats on a train, or food at the table.

  Never so long as you live, write a letter

  to a man—no matter who he is—that you would

  be ashamed to see in a newspaper above your signature.

  If you think rules of etiquette occur only in high society, then you would be mistaken. In all eras of history, and in every sector of life, thoughts about what one should never do have been very popular. Some of the best have come from the rough-and-tumble frontier world of nineteenth-century America—as in this 1880s piece of “Stagecoach Etiquette” from Nebraska’s Omaha Herald:

  Never attempt to fire a gun or pistol while on the road.

  The writer of the article continued:It may frighten the team, and the careless handling and cocking of the gun makes nervous people nervous. Don’t discuss politics and religion nor point out places on the road where horrible murders have been committed, if delicate women are among the passengers.

  This stagecoach comportment rule is a nice reminder that the concept of etiquette has been applied to men as well as women. In 2003, Joe Kita and the editors of Men’s Health magazine wrote Guy Q: 1,305 Totally Essential Secrets You Either Know, or You Don’t Know. The book of “complex situations reduced to essential lessons” included a number of well-known secrets:

  Never iron a tie.

  Never eat food out of their original containers.

  Never wear warm, freshly ironed pants: You’ll destroy the crease.

  But many o
ther rules were expressed for the very first time. For example, when meeting a celebrity for the first time:

  Never refer to a celebrity’s past work.

  He hears “I loved you in . . .” a thousand times a day.

  Instead, ask what he’s currently working on. Celebs feed off this.

  Or when ordering a drink at a bar:

  Never say, “When you get a chance.”

  That grates on bartenders’ nerves. “Hi” works best.

  Or when eating at an outdoor restaurant:

  Never eat food that’s displayed beneath one of those electric bug zappers.

  When the little guys hit the electrical grid,

  they explode, scattering bug guts for several feet.

  And finally, when getting medical care at a clinic or a hospital:

  Never trust a nurse with fake nails. Artificial fingernails harbor more bacteria than regular fingernails.

  In the remainder of the chapter, I’m going to provide many more examples of strongly worded and unequivocally phrased advice. There will be no hemming and hawing in the pages to follow. In each and every case, you will be advised never to do something that the advice-giver believes will be contrary to your best interests, counterproductive, absolutely stupid, or downright dangerous.

  Never express more than you feel.ANONYMOUS

  This saying advises people against feigning an emotion they do not feel, or exaggerating one that they do. The advice is commonly given to actors and writers. In How to Say It, a 2001 writing and speaking guide, Rosalie Maggio wrote about the saying:“Never express more than you feel” is a good guideline, especially in thank-you letters, where we try to make up in verbiage what we lack in enthusiasm. A simple “thank you” is effective.

  Much great neveristic advice has been anonymously authored. Here are some favorites:

  Never eat unless you’re hungry.

  Never sign something without first reading it.

  Never let a computer know you’re in a hurry.

  Never argue with an idiot.

  They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience.

  Never confuse your career with your life.

  (this is likely based on the Dave Barry observation,

  “You should not confuse your career with your life”)

  Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

  (and this is almost certainly an adaptation

  of a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1935 novel Tender Is the Night:

  “In any case you mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat”)

  Never permit failure to become a habit.WILLIAM F. BOOK, in How to Succeed in College (1927)

  Here’s a rule I recommend:

  Never practice two vices at once.TALLULAH BANKHEAD

  In his 1954 play The Matchmaker, Thornton Wilder has the character Malachi Stack deliver another well-known thought on the subject of vices:

  I discovered an important rule that I’m going to pass on to you:

  Never support two weaknesses at a time.

  It’s your combination sinners—

  your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards—

  who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.

  Never be grandiloquent when you want to drive home a searching truth.HENRY WARD BEECHER, in an 1870 speech at the Yale Divinity School

  Beecher urged preachers to avoid “a literary style” of oratory that used “words and phrases peculiar to literature alone, and not to common life.” He introduced the advice by saying, “Involved sentences, crooked, circuitous, and parenthetical, no matter how musically they may be balanced, are prejudicial to a facile understanding of the truth.” Grandiloquence, a word rarely used today, means “pompous or bombastic speech.”

  Never let money control you.RITA MAE BROWN, in Writing from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writer’s Manual (1988)

  Brown added: “I’d rather see someone spend every red cent and relish his/her life than scrimp, obsess, and pinch the pennies. There’s something repugnant about a person who centers his life around money.”

  Never speak of the past any more than you can help.GELETT BURGESS, quoted in a 1973 issue of Forbes magazine

  Never despair. But if you do, work on in despair.EDMUND BURKE, piggybacking on “Never despair,” a saying from the Roman poet known as Horace (first century B.C.)

  Never negotiate in a hurry.AARON BURR

  This was one of Burr’s favorite sayings—and one he offered to many clients in his role as a lawyer. Dr. Phil McGraw provided an updated version in Relationship Rescue (2000):

  Never be in a hurry when making decisions,

  the consequences of which will be around for a long time.

  Read only useful books;

  and never quit a subject till you are thoroughly master of it.LORD CHESTERFIELD (Philip Dormer Stanhope)

  Chesterfield offered this advice to his son in a 1748 letter. In a 1759 letter, he continued the theme: “In short, let it be your maxim through life, to know all you can know, yourself; and never to trust implicitly to the information of others.”

  Never go back to a place where you have been happy.

  Until you do it remains alive for you. If you go back it will be destroyed.AGATHA CHRISTIE, from her 1977 autobiography

  Never . . . esteem men on account of their riches, or their station.

  Respect goodness, find it where you may.WILLIAM COBBETT, in Advice to Young Men (1829)

  Never let your persistence and passion turn into stubbornness and ignorance.ANTHONY J. D’ANGELO, in The College Blue Book (1995)

  When D’Angelo was a college senior at Pennsylvania’s West Chester University, he tried to condense everything he had learned over his college experience into several hundred recommendations that might benefit other students. After graduation, he founded his own personal empowerment company, spoke on the college lecture circuit, and became a contributing editor to Chicken Soup for the College Soul (1999). The tips in his original Blue Book borrowed heavily from the self-help and inspirational literature, and they ranged from the serious to the silly:

  Never stop learning; knowledge doubles every fourteen months.

  Never rent an apartment with electric heat unless you live in the south.

  Never play Twister naked unless you have a can of non-stick cooking spray.

  Never drink alcohol when you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired.

  Booze will only exacerbate these emotions.

  Never harbor grudges; they sour your stomach and do no harm to anyone else.ROBERTSON DAVIES, from a character in Murther & Walking Spirits (1991)

  Never get bored or cynical.WALT DISNEY

  Never wave at a video camera. ESQUIRE MAGAZINE EDITORS, in The Rules: A Man’s Guide to Life (2005)

  For many years, Esquire has run a feature on rules men can use to guide their lives. In 2005, the editors compiled the best rules and published them in an attractive coffee-table book. Of the 697 entries, many were expressed neveristically. Other rules can be found in later chapters of this book, but here are a few more that fit under the advice rubric:

  Never select a tattoo just because it’s on sale.

  Never be the one to start—or finish—a stadium “wave.”

  If you’re younger than 80,

  you should never utter the phrase “the whole kit and kaboodle.”

  Never give a party if you will be the most interesting person there.MICKEY FRIEDMAN

  Never argue with the inevitable.PATRICIA FRIPP

  Fripp, a popular corporate speaker, was likely inspired by a famous observation from the American poet James Russell Lowell: “There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.”

  Never feel compelled to finish everything on your plate.DR. SANJAY GUPTA, in a February 2001

  issue of Men’s Journal

  Gupta wrote this in an article titled “The Completely Doable
Guide to Living to 100.” The advice runs counter to a lesson many received as children (“clean your plate”), but most experts agree that eating less is an important key to living longer. Regarding the amount of food to eat, Gupta provided this helpful rule of thumb: “Never take a portion that is bigger than the size of your palm.” A few years earlier, Dr. Wayne Dyer said similarly:

  Never eat by anyone else’s timetable.

  Rid yourself of thoughts like, “It’s supper time, I guess I should eat.”