APHORISMS
(3)
Some longer pieces
My betting shop's aged manager, assisted on busy days such as Saturdays by his equally aged wife, continually blames "the old cow" for the mistakes with which his customers confront him. Oh how I envy him! Whilst I could never imagine myself referring to anyone as "the old cow", oh what I would give for someone who I could refrain from calling an old cow.
If the stodginess of your manner is designed to disguise the thinness of your matter, you are likely to replace a construction to decorate by constructing a decoration
I thought there might well be an alternative to the Nobel Peace Prize in the form of an Ignoble War Prize and would propose as some of the award winners: Margaret Thatcher, Yasser Arafat, George Bush (both of them!), Tony Blair, Paisley and Adams (a joint prize) and, of course, a certain Herr Schickelbgrüber
I pondered an article on the American spelling of such words as humor, labor and honor, and calling the article: "I get along without "U" very well."
From the time we are born we develop a psychological profile. To an extent this is predisposed by inherited characteristics and modified by environmental influences. As we grow older our basic psychological “shape” is moulded and reinforced by a variety of forces and we tend to become comfortable in the resultant life script as if it were an old overcoat. We are reluctant to discard it, even when it is not serving a useful purpose.
I decided years ago that life is too short for me to wait for all the good, positive strokes that I know I deserve. But that is not the same thing as knowing that I do not need to accept the negative strokes, the brickbats that come flying my way, which I know to be thoroughly undeserved.
Einstein has been quoted as saying, "if the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts". This strikes me as being a very similar proposal to: "if at first you don't succeed, redefine success."
The first step towards a cure in therapy comes with the recognition that the therapist's problem may be greater than my own. The first step towards success in self-help therapy is the realisation that those that would cure me need first to examine their own problems. Work it out for yourself clearly has more than one meaning.
I was toying with the idea of publishing a self-help book called Damning with Faint Praise, subtitled The Art of Coarse Book Reviewing until I realised that it would be self-defeating as only the review copies would find readers
There are only two valid answers to the question "Why?" One is "Because", the other is "Why not?" Anything else is meaningless.