sonora2sonoma

From somewhere deep in the recesses of my time-addled brain this morning popped up the phrase “patience comes to those who wait.”

An online search quickly revealed my rescued phrase to be an example of what’s called a  “mixed idiom,” a jumbled joining of “all things come to those who wait” and “patience is a virtue.” (1) I also learned, as an interesting aside, that tee shirts are available online from a source that specializes in such mangled malaphors.

But back on point, my excursion into idiomatic insults originated while I was brewing my morning pot of coffee and observing, as I often do during that activity, the annoyingly unpredictable interval of time it takes for the water to come to a boil. At these times, another turn of phrase—“a watched pot never boils” often resounds through my brain.

Another online search revealed this little gem to be a proverb—a “short, common saying or phrase that gives advice or shares a universal truth.” (2)

While undoubtedly useful as a means of noting that time seems to pass more slowly when we are waiting for something to happen, it seems a bit disingenuous to equate the parlance with proverbial phraseology since, while it may be a means of mollifying our mortal proclivity toward peevishness, it is by no means a truism: I discovered this morning that a watched pot actually does boil, if the observer has the patience to wait.   

Tim Konrad                                          January 23, 2021

• https://mixedidioms.co.uk/patience-comes-to-those-who-wait/
• https://grammarist.com/phrase/a-watched-pot-never-boils/#:~:text=A watched pot never boils is a proverb.,to supply the ending of the proverb himself.