Modern Proverbs Appeal

[Wilson Gray]

Don't mess with the meat where you make your bread

A BE version of "Don't dip your pen into the company ink," "Don't play
where you work," etc.

-Wilson

On 5/24/07, Landau, James <James.Landau at ngc.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Landau, James" <James.Landau at NGC.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Modern Proverbs Appeal
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Without checking whether the YBQ already has these:
>
> "An airplane cannot fly until the weight of the paperwork equals the
> weight of the airplane"
>
> And further on the subject of paperwork:  "No job is done until the
> paperwork is finished".  At least two professionally-printed posters
> were available with this quote in the  1970's.
>
> "I must be a mushroom.  They keep me in the dark and feed me nothing but
> bullshit."  Also available as a professionally printed poster in the
> 1970's.  Both of the preceeding were quite popular in the Pentagon when
> I worked there 1969-1976.
>
> "The most dangerous part in a car is the nut that holds the wheel".  I
> think ADS-L had a thread on this one a while ago.
>
> "The way to tell that a man has no idea what he is doing is that he
> tries to enforce rules that simply don't apply to the situation."  This
> was told to me by my boss Lt. Harold Harrington in 1970 and I have found
> this piece of bureaucratic advise to have come in handy many times over
> the years.  I have no idea whether Harrington invented it or heard it
> somewhere.
>
> "Music has been going steadily downhill ever since Johann Sebastian."
> This from my music teacher, Robert "Bob" Johnson, about 1974.  Bob was a
> specialist in Renaissance and Baroque music.
>
>     - Jim Landau
>
> On 5/20/07, Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
> > Subject:      Modern Proverbs Appeal
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > ---------
> >
> > I would welcome suggestions of "modern proverbs" (defined for this
> > purpose as proverbs whose earliest evidence is post-1900) other than
> > those listed in The Yale Book of Quotations and Dictionary of American
> Proverbs.
> > Suggestions made without checking those two reference works are fine
> too.
> >
> > Fred Shapiro
> >
> >
> >
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> --
> > Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
> > Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS
> >    Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press
> > Yale Law School                             ISBN 0300107986
> > e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu
> http://quotationdictionary.com
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > ----
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
>
> --
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -----
>                                               -Sam'l Clemens
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
                                              -Sam'l Clemens

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org