The answer to Freud's famous question "What does woman want?"

Give women what they ask for and when the demands end, the answer will be known.

ADDED: And then there's the less famous question: Why does this post have no link? If you really need a link for Freud's having said "What does woman want?" (or the alternate translations, "What do women want?"/"What does a woman want?"), feel free to Google it and get millions of search results. If you want a link for the statement, "Give women what they ask for and when the demands end, the answer will be known," that would be a link to this very post. It's my aphorism. If you want a link to what made me think about this, that's not how things work around here, where the conversation goes on and on, which is one of the many things women want. 

"I was reckless writing about recklessness."

I say, noting that I got quoted over at Instapundit with a missing "it's" apostrophe: "he’s entirely reckless about what these laws would really mean to ordinary people, and its a recklessness that thrives in the mind of someone who...."

"Oh! It's blogging," says Meade. "It's the internet. Think how many times you've gotten it right."

"And it's more embarrassing to get the apostrophe wrong the other way," I soothe myself, referring to  putting the apostrophe in "its" when it's supposed to be out.

"It's embarrassing to be embarrassed," Meade asserts aphoristically.

"But I was criticizing recklessness at the very point when I was reckless," I brood nonetheless. "It's like the way whenever you mock a misspelling, you end up misspelling something."

I decide to write this post, which — speaking of blogging — is the antidote to embarrassment.

***

King Kong, little elves

On the rooftops they dance

Valentino-type tangos

While the makeup man’s hands

Shut the eyes of the dead

Not to embarrass anyone

Farewell Angelina

The sky is embarrassed

And I must be gone 

"If you can dream it, you can achieve it."

"Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude."

Etc. etc.

"It is hard to love people whom we do not respect..."

"... but it is harder still to love those whom we respect more highly than we respect ourselves."

A maxim of Le Duc de La Rochefoucauld.

"All work and no play is no fun at all."

"The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens."

"There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows."

"A lone rooster sees a lot of all the hens in the flock, but the hen with the largest comb gets a bigger dose of sperm."

A discovery about chickens.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O gets it:

There should be a Bulwer-Lytton type contest for the world's worst written aphorisms.

Why should I branch out? I've branched in.

Is that an original aphorism? Google says yes. So... yes?

"Nothing seems to me to be rarer today than genuine hypocrisy."

From a list of 35 aphorisms about lying.

But none of the aphorisms on the list is the aphorism I am looking for. You know the feeling that there is an aphorism that's already out there for something you're trying to say in aphorism form. You can say it briefly, but not in the words that must be in the aphorism.

Here's as close as I can get to saying what seems to me to be a rough paraphrase for a reasonably well-known aphorism: He who lies about small things will lie about big things. Or: Little lies foretell big lies.

What I'm looking for is the "Where there's smoke, there's fire" of lying.

There should be a word for the feeling that there is already an aphorism for the idea that you could express in your own words. That feeling inhibits the composition of one's own new aphorism. I mean, if you were trying to remember the aphorism "Where there's smoke, there's fire" and instead wrote the notion up in your own snappy words, it would never replace "Where there's smoke, there's fire." "Where there's smoke, there's fire" is so perfectly apt. Hence the inhibition.

It's a separate question whether the idea expressed in the aphorism I'm looking for is actually true. I did find this old Metafilter question, asked by a woman who worried her husband's little lies. She expressed certainty that he wasn't lying about anything big (like infidelity), but she was catching many little lies, such as the fact that he'd said he'd carry a bag lunch to work, when in fact he ate at a restaurant. She also worried about her own worrying, since her husband was "a wonderful, patient, generous guy who treats me well and loves me more than anything," and she didn't want to be like the "extremely controlling parent" he grew up with and who probably caused him to develop a habit of telling little lies.

I thought of another aphorism in the vicinity of what I'm searching for: "Don't sweat the small stuff." Do little things not matter? Or can we tell something important about a person by the way they handle the details?

"God is in the details"... right? Or is it "The Devil is in the details"? Maybe if I knew which of those 2 expressions is the right one, I'd know the answer to the question whether the idea expressed in the searched-for little-lies aphorism is true. Interestingly, both "God is in the details" and "The Devil is in the details" have their own Wikipedia page.

According to the "God" page, "God is in the details" (or "detail") seems to date back to Gustave Flaubert (written in French), and the Devil version is a variant. Satisfyingly, the "Devil" page backs up the theory that God came first.

Google's n-gram function reveals that the phrase "the devil is in the details" does not appear in print before ca. 1975.

Flaubert died in 1880, and it's quite clear that "God is in the detail" was often attributed to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who died in 1969. Perhaps it was around 1975 that we began to lose our veneration for detail, the sense that the little things mattered. Now, to fret over details is prissy and fussy. You're a stickler. A controlling parent. A person who sweats the small stuff is... sweaty.

There's this, which I quoted the other day:

Wittgenstein once said that the following bit of verse by Longfellow could serve him as a motto:

In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the Gods are everywhere.

The quote is from that book "On Bullshit," which I've been reading and which actually isn't the origin of this morning's search for an aphorism. The origin of that is a discussion we had yesterday about someone — nobody you know.

IN THE COMMENTS: JackOfVA and Kit Carson come up with what I'm sure I was trying to think of:  "Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus" ("False in one thing, false in everything").

"White House Already Denying That Mandate Is A Tax. If you deny that it’s a tax, you admit that it’s unconstitutional...."

Says Instapundit, linking here.

I've got to disagree. Under Chief Justice Roberts' opinion, what matters under the constitutional law is how the thing operates in reality, not what you call it. You can switch the the labels around, play whatever political euphemism games you like, and the judges will let you get away with that. It's propaganda. Knock yourself out. Bamboozle the people. Democracy rolls on.

But in court — the message is — we look through the surface and see what is really happening. And if it is structured and functions like a tax, it's a tax.

You know, there's a saying that lawyers and lawprofs like. I think it's corny, so I haven't been saying it. I don't think that in 25+ years of teaching law I've ever said it, but I've heard it said so many times, and it's said because it's a way of saying something that lawyers and lawprofs really think about law: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.

Googling that saying, I get — as my first result — a Wikipedia page titled "Duck test."

Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) may have coined the phrase when he wrote "when I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck."The phrase may also have originated much later with Emil Mazey, secretary-treasurer of the United Auto Workers, at a labor meeting in 1946 accusing a person of being a communist....

Later references to the duck test include Cardinal Richard Cushing's, who used the phrase in 1964 in reference to Fidel Castro.

Oh! I didn't know I'd encounter so much communism!

Make of it what you will. We have a democracy, and it's not going to work if we can't handle the bullshit.

The President can say it's not a tax, and it's still a tax for the purposes of analyzing the taxing power. The Supreme Court has validated lying.

Did you notice the other case that came out last Thursday also put the stamp of approval on lying? It was United States v. Alvarez — the "Stolen Valor" case. A man who lied and said he'd won the Congressional Medal of Honor was prosecuted, and he won on free speech grounds in the Supreme Court.

So Thursday in the U.S. Supreme Court was a great day for the grand old human practice of lying. From Justice Alito's dissenting opinion in Alvarez:

Respondent’s brief features a veritable paean to lying. According to respondent, his lie about the Medal of Honor was nothing out of the ordinary for 21st-century Americans. “Everyone lies,” he says. Brief for Respondent 10. “We lie all the time.” Ibid. “[H]uman beings are constantly forced to choose the persona we present to the world, and our choices nearly always involve intentional omissions and misrepresentations, if not outright deception.” Id., at 39.

 Everybody's always lying.

Now, grow up, pay attention, and don't get played.

Well-behaved women don't deserve a spot at Princeton.

The Atlantic has a long article with a title I feel like I've seen a hundred times: "Why Women Still Can’t Have It All."  It's very putting-the-duh-in-dull. I'm not saying you should read it. I just want to talk about the penultimate paragraph:

I continually push the young women in my classes to speak more. 

The author, Anne-Marie Slaughter, is a Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Somebody please tell me why Princeton University — Princeton University! — is admitting women who need to be continually pushed to speak more. In the 21st century. They don't deserve the seats they fill. They shouldn't be coddled. They should be flunked out. You get into Princeton and you sit there too timid — or too withholding — to speak? Unacceptable. The teacher shouldn't be prodding you.

They must gain the confidence to value their own insights and questions, and to present them readily. 

Is this kindergarten? This is Princeton! How many applications for admission did Princeton turn down in the process of matriculating these ladies?

Yesterday, I saw the old bumper sticker: "Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History," and we had a conversation about whether the sentiment had any relevance today. I took the position that it did, because women still succumb to the cultural expectation that they should be pleasing and well-liked. It's a problem. Get over it or don't, but why are you occupying classroom space that could be used to good effect by someone who doesn't need a university professor to nurture her to the point where she can "present" her "insights" "readily"? If you'd confessed your limitation on your application form, the university could — and should — have rejected you.

My husband agrees...

A classic feminist line!

... but he actually tries to get the young men in his classes to act more like the women—to speak less and listen more. If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal. 

Yes, men. You need to back off and behave more like the women who need the professor to continually push them to value their insights so that they may present them readily. The future depends on your going beta.

We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us.

Insist. Try a petite stamping of the foot while you insist. Yes, you can, little lady. And little men: Behave yourselves!

Absurd!

Business clichés.

89 of them.

ADDED: #53 might strike lawyers as misguided:

It’s not actionable enough/what’s the deliverable? = You guys do the work on refining the idea. I’m too tired.

Years ago I worked at a market research firm that had a video ad that it used to show prospective clients. It went on and on, but the repeated tag line was: Above all, it's actionable!

I thought it was embarrassing and all the actionable business was funny, but I had never seen the word and simply assumed it had the intended meaning — that the firm was good at springing into action and getting things done.

When I got to law school and saw the meaning the word has in tort law, I experienced a strange mixture of pity and mirth.

Looking at the OED today, I see the tort law meaning — "Giving cause for legal action" — goes back to 1601:

1601   W. Lambard Archion (1635) 102   Baited, & bitten with libells & slanders that be not actionable.

The other meaning — "Able to be acted upon or put into practice; useful, practical" — goes back only to 1913:

1913   C. Frederick New Housek. xii. 192   Refuse to let the mind wallow and dawdle around a problem without arriving at definite, actionable conclusions.

Here's a recent one:

2004   Jrnl. Amer. Med. Assoc. 14 Jan. 184/2   The availability of advanced technology has changed the nature, scope, and potential of drug utilization programs to provide valuable, actionable, patient-specific information to prescribers.

You'd think the AMA folk would be more sensitive about tort law.

"The best punishment for a man who would take your wife is to let him have her."

A tl;dr summary to something that was actually not too long responding to a call for "instant karma" stories.

"God Bless the Whole World"... "Love > Fear"...

... "Don't Fuck With Wisconsin."


(Enlarge.)

The ultimate OWS slogan: "We need more; you have more."

Spoken off-handedly by a 33-year-old protester named Amin Husain, quoted in a NYT article about how the OWS people are pressuring Trinity Church to let them set up camp on church property.

Trinity’s rector, the Rev. James H. Cooper, defended the church’s record of support for the protesters, including not only expressions of sympathy, but also meeting spaces, resting areas, pastoral services, electricity, bathrooms, even blankets and hot chocolate. But he said the church’s lot — called Duarte Square — was not an appropriate site for the protesters, noting that “there are no basic elements to sustain an encampment.”

“Trinity has probably done as much or more for the protesters than any other institution in the area,” Mr. Cooper wrote on his parish Web site. “Calling this an issue of ‘political sanctuary’ is manipulative and blind to reality. Equating the desire to seize this property with uprisings against tyranny is misguided, at best. Hyperbolic distortion drives up petition signatures, but doesn’t make it right.”

Manipulative and blind to reality... oh, really? Speaking of casually letting the truth slip out!

"We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, 'What is the purpose of a sofa?'"

Malcolm Gladwell quotes Walter Isaacson quoting Laurene Powell quoting her husband Steve Jobs.

Powell lived with her fabulously wealthy husband in a house often mostly devoid of furniture, because he didn't want his space infiltrated with anything he didn't feel perfectly sure of.

It would be hard to get fabulously wealthy if all consumers were so resistant to purchasing, but it might be a good attitude for individual consumers to adopt. Especially if you live alone. It's great to appreciate the open, uncluttered space you have and to save your money. But if you live with someone else, she'd better share or at least love that attitude, because if those empty spaces are perceived as deprivations, it's going to hurt — especially if she breaks away and taps into that pile of money you kept instead of blowing on upholstered merchandise.

And then there's the pristine space that is the inside of your body. You can be very fussy about what you let in there, and you can wait and wait until your sure it's exactly right, and then what? From the Isaacson biography:

To the horror of his friends and wife, Jobs decided not to have surgery to remove the tumor, which was the only accepted medical approach. “I really didn’t want them to open up my body...” he told me years later with a hint of regret....

“The big thing was that he really was not ready to open his body,” Powell recalled. “It’s hard to push someone to do that.”

I love the default position of doing nothing. First, do no harm. That's a fine aphorism. A saying I made up that I've relied on for decades and care about immensely is: Better than nothing is a high standard. But it's not such a high standard that it's only beaten by perfection. Perfect is the enemy of good. Now, there's a great saying. Get the cancer surgery that saves your life. And if your wife wants a sofa and she can't explain exactly why... you'd better think about it. Empty space can get really empty.

Posters, with window reflections.

Some interesting sayings, especially for Madison:


(Enlarge.)


(Enlarge.)

Inside the Overture Center, it was a demonstration of poster printing.

ADDED: I enlarged a photograph enough to see the printer's name "Kennedy Prints," and Googling, I got here and found this trailer for a documentary about Amos Paul Kennedy Jr.:



Wow! Click on the last link in the post for a picture of Kennedy. Click through to the enlargements. The aphorisms on the posters are really terrific.

"The Constitution is the rules; politics is the game."

"The alternatives to organized political contention are anarchy or sheep-like passivity."

Richard Brookhiser speaks in one aphorism after another in this dialogue with Kathryn Jean Lopez about his new book about James Madison, "James Madison." (Buy it here. I just did.)

The headline on the interview is "Politics Is Madison," and I was delighted to see, that it wasn't about my crazy little city in the Midwest.

More from the interview:

LOPEZ: What accounts for Madison’s scorn for John Adams and his love for Thomas Jefferson? Does either man’s relationship with Madison provide essential insight into Adams or Jefferson?

BROOKHISER: Madison never spent much time with John Adams, and could not see beyond his obnoxious qualities to the good ones. Thomas Jefferson was the cool older brother Madison never had — brilliant, eloquent, quirky — but at the same time a fellow Virginian and an ideological soul mate....

LOPEZ: What might Madison think about Barack Obama?

BROOKHISER: Jefferson’s vices, without the charm.

Maureen Dowd: "Perry told the students, 'God uses broken people to reach a broken world.' What does that even mean?"

That's in a column that's all about portraying Perry as the epitome of a special American-style of idiocy:

The Republicans are now the “How great is it to be stupid?” party. In perpetrating the idea that there’s no intellectual requirement for the office of the presidency, the right wing of the party offers a Farrelly Brothers “Dumb and Dumber” primary in which evolution is avant-garde.

Having grown up with a crush on William F. Buckley Jr. for his sesquipedalian facility, it’s hard for me to watch the right wing of the G.O.P. revel in anti-intellectualism and anti-science cant.

But if you're so smart, why can't you understand the poetically rich "God uses broken people to reach a broken world"? You think intelligence is demonstrated by the pompous overachiever's use of big words and long sentences?

Crisp aphorism marks the genius.

"IC Solutions CEO Joe Stafford, who takes time to reread the 1,100 pages of the pro-capitalism novel Atlas Shrugged every two years..."

"... says he doesn't 'have enough time in the day to bother with' the 94 pages of Cheese."

From a 2002 USA Today article about the popularity of the book "Who Moved My Cheese?" I stumbled across that article as a result of reading the "Who Moved My Cheese?" article in Wikipedia, which I did because I said "Who Moved My Cheese?" — in a conversation with Meade about the troubles he (like others) was having with the new comments format on this blog — and I then realized that I'd long assumed I knew what "Who Moved My Cheese?" meant and, moreover, that Wikipedia would probably summarize the book, which it did. I learned that I was kind of wrong about what "Who Moved My Cheese?" was about. I thought it was about the way fussy people are disconcerted by small changes in their environment.

Some managers are known to mass-distribute copies of the book to employees, some of whom see this as an insult, or an attempt to characterize dissent as not "moving with the cheese". In the corporate environment, management has been known to distribute this book to employees during times of "structural re-organization," or during cost-cutting measures, in an attempt to portray unfavorable or unfair changes in an optimistic or opportunistic way. 

So that's why it was a big bestseller for 5 years. People were buying it for other people.

4 Questions:

1. Have you ever been insulted by a book someone gave you to read? Have you ever — be honest — insulted anyone with a gift book?

2. What 2 things in your life are equivalent to Joe Stafford's "Atlas Shrugged" and "Who Moved My Cheese?"? (That is: You have time for something that take a lot of time, but you don't have time for something else in the same category that takes very little time.)

3. What catchphrase have you discovered yourself to be using incorrectly because you never bothered to partake of the source material?

4. If you had to think of a parable off the top of your head, do you think you could come up with something better than "Who Moved My Cheese?" and if so, does it irritate you that Dr. Spencer Johnson had that big-ass best seller? (Next time write a parable that will be useful propaganda for people with money and the motivation to make a lot of insult-gifts.)