Wise Old Sayings

WISE OLD SAYINGS?
By
DeBorn Luzer

I was reading an article the other night when I came across a saying that I have heard all my life and never took the time to examine it. The writer was referring to someone’s crazy idea as a “pipe dream”. Finally, having plenty of time on my hands, I decided to research its origin. After a long and arduous trek through my one dictionary until I reached the “Ps”, and then seconds and seconds of devoted reading I discovered the true meaning. It simply is defined as a fantastic and wild idea, and that the saying is derived from the illusions created by the smoking of a pipe of opium.

Okay, that one was pretty self-explanatory, if you stopped to think about it. My trouble was that I always thought about it in the context of a water pipe, or a sewer pipe, and I could just never visualize a dream coming out of a sink or a sewage line. Just goes to show you that I’m not a pipe smoker.

Another one that I heard in the same day, and have also heard all my life, tends to raise a few more questions, though. Someone was discussing another’s financial status and said that “they had enough money to burn a wet mule”. Every time I’ve heard someone use the expression all those in earshot always laugh loud and boisterously but never explain why it’s funny. I’ve always laughed along with them just as if I understood why they said it that way. Upon closer thought I admit that I’m confused. Why would you want to burn a wet mule? Why a wet mule instead of a dry mule, although I’m sure that, if you were going to burn a mule, a wet one would be harder? Is the mule dead or alive? My imagination really goes to work whenever I think of someone trying to burn a wet live mule, but if it is alive why not just dry it off with a towel? If it’s dead why not just dig a hole and bury it instead of burning it, and if it is dead how did it get wet? Do dead wet mules carry contagious diseases like smallpox where you have to burn everything to get rid of the disease?

And, even if you had a tobacco barn full of paper money, why would you use it to burn the mule, dead or not? I’m fairly sure, judging by the way that I grew up, that anyone who owned a mule also owned a stable with lots of bales of hay in it. Wouldn’t this be a more reasonable alternative to using paper money? Or maybe gasoline, kerosene, or even coal oil. Just how much money would it take and how did someone calculate it in the first place? Did they have so much money that they actually burned a wet mule with it just to see, and did they use ones, tens, twenties, hundreds, or a variety of denominations? I understand that a fool and his money are soon parted - - I don’t understand how a fool and his money came together in the first place - - but this saying had to come from some occurrence in the past.

I know that the user of the phrase simply meant that the person they were speaking about was very, very rich and had more money than they knew what to do with, but phrases like this, and how they came about, intrigue me. Why wouldn’t someone trying to describe someone’s wealth come up with a more sensible comparison such as, “He’s got enough money to choke a horse”?

As I said, some phrases raise more questions than others and none that will probably ever be answered. Maybe next time I’ll delve into the mysteries of other old sayings like, “Straight from the horse’s mouth” (forget about Mr. Ed), or “Never look a gift horse in the mouth”. Until then, my apologies. It’s been a slow week.