Mind your language

Charles Moore told of a headmaster (The Spectator’s Notes, 29 January) who found that no one knew the meaning of the proverb: ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ I suppose the antique syntax baffled them.

Charles Moore told of a headmaster (The Spectator’s Notes, 29 January) who found that no one knew the meaning of the proverb: ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ I suppose the antique syntax baffled them.

They probably wouldn’t get ‘Penny wise, pound foolish’ or ‘Don’t spoil a sheep for a ha’porth of tar’ either. It is in the nature of proverbs to embody archaisms, and antiquarianism is quite alien to the current generation, for all its interest in Timewatch.

‘If the fox be crafty, more crafty is he that catches him,’ is a pretty transparent proverb, if not one much heard. It first appears in print in James Mabbe’s translation of the endless 15th-century play Celestina, or as he titled it The Spanish Bawd (1631). It comes in Act XIX. The play is rarely read voluntarily, despite Mabbe’s ‘verbal inventiveness’, as his biographer calls it. He was a fellow of Magdalen, Oxford, and probably pronounced his name Mabby, for he adopted for his translation the playful pseudonym of Don Diego Puede-Ser (May-Be — geddit?). The original Spanish specifies ‘vixen’ in the proverb, for the play is chiefly concerned with the sexual allure of women, with which the female of the vulpine species is identified. I was once called a vixen when I wouldn’t give any money to a drug addict at a railway terminus in Madrid. It helped my vocabulary.

Spanish is known for a wealth of proverbs to every purpose, and none. One of my favourites simply goes: ‘For the eyes, the elbow.’ That would puzzle the headmaster’s colleagues too, and all it means is that it is unwise to rub your eyes with your fingers in a hot, dirty country like Spain lest you contract ophthalmic disease, which many did a century ago — one in 30 in Seville were blind.