Mardy Grothe - Neverisms

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 other 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.