Already Answered
ALREADY ANSWERED — THE BLOG SERIES
The questions keeping you up at night were asked three thousand years ago. They were answered, too.
Short essays that take a question people are actually asking and follow it back to the Wisdom Book that already answered it. Subscribe to get each new post as it goes up.
Pride Goes Before a Fall
Two men in a checkout line said it about somebody from work. It is a real verse, and what people say is two halves of two different clauses, welded together.
ALREADY ANSWERED · ALREADY QUOTED · No. 3
Where the saying comes from, and what the rest of the passage says
The two men ahead of me in the checkout line were talking about somebody from work. I gathered he had spent most of the spring letting everyone know about a promotion that was coming, and that last week it had gone to somebody else. "Well," the older one said, working his card into the reader, "pride goes before a fall." The other one laughed and said that was about right.
He was quoting the Book of Proverbs. He was also quoting it the way nearly everyone does, which is to say not quite. And I am in no position to look down on him. I have used that line myself, in that same tone, about people who were not there to hear it.
This one is on my list. Sayings out of the seven books in the middle of the Bible, said every day by people with no idea they are quoting anything. You knew it by heart. You never knew whose.
The verse is Proverbs 16:18, more than two thousand years old, and here is the whole thing. "Pride goes before disaster, and a haughty spirit before a fall."
Now look at what we kept. We took "pride" off the front of the sentence and "before a fall" off the back, welded them together, and dropped everything in between. What people say is two halves of two different clauses. It is not a quotation. It is a splice.
The last saying I wrote about here came through two thousand years of handling almost word for word. This one did not. This one got cut apart on the way.
Then look at what fell out. Disaster. The King James, the translation most of these sayings traveled through, has "destruction" sitting in the same slot. Either way, that is the heavy word in the verse, and it is the one that did not survive the trip into everyday speech.
That swap matters more than it sounds like it should. A fall is a thing you get up from. It has a shape we enjoy: somebody gets too big, somebody trips, somebody learns something. There is a comeuppance in it, and comeuppance is satisfying, which is most of the reason the sentence is still alive in checkout lines. Disaster does not work that way. Disaster is not a lesson with a moral on the end of it. It is a wreck, and people do not always walk out of one.
Something else went missing in the splice. Hebrew poetry works by saying a thing twice, the second line answering the first. Pride and a haughty spirit are one trouble named twice. Disaster and a fall are one ending named twice, though not at the same volume. The saying took one word from each line, and it did not take them at random.
Here is the part I did not expect to find. The sentence is almost always aimed outward. It gets said about the neighbor, the boss, the candidate, the guy from work who would not stop talking about his promotion. That is its natural habitat, and I have put it there myself more than once. Proverbs does not use it that way. The book was written to be read by the person holding it. This verse sits in a long stretch of advice from a worried parent to a son. It was never a verdict to hand down. It was a warning to keep.
There is a reason aiming it outward comes so easily. In 1981 a Swedish psychologist named Ola Svenson asked two groups of students, one American and one Swedish, to rate their own driving against everyone else's. Ninety-three percent of the American group put themselves above average for skill. Eighty-eight percent placed themselves in the safer half. You cannot have eighty-eight percent of a group in that group's top half. The study was run again recently and it held. What it shows is not that some people are arrogant. It is that most of us rate ourselves higher than the math allows. Pride in the proverb's sense is not a personality type that other people have. It is closer to the setting we come installed with.
My own pride never looked like pride. The years I spent away from the Church were not a crisis and not an argument. I believed I already understood what was in there, and that showing up on Sunday would not add to it. Nobody would have called that arrogance, least of all me. It felt like being busy, and being sure. I was past forty before I opened the books that had my number, and this was one of the verses waiting in them.
Proverbs does not leave it at the warning, either. A few chapters earlier it says what to do instead: "When pride comes, disgrace comes; but with the humble is wisdom." Notice what the second half promises. Not humiliation, which is what the saying threatens and what we half enjoy watching. Wisdom, handed to the humble. That is what the whole book is chasing, and it turns out the door into it is something a person can choose on an ordinary Tuesday.
It is a better sentence than we made it. It is also a harder one.
If you pass this along, send it to somebody who likes knowing where words come from. Do not send it to the person you were thinking of.
Already quoted. Already answered.
The Book of Proverbs is one of the seven Wisdom Books explored in The Original Search Engine. Learn more at solomongraybooks.com/the-book.
The overheard scenes in this series are figures, the way Job is a figure. See Post 0 for a note on the people in this series.
Proverbs is quoted from the New American Bible, Revised Edition (Proverbs 16:18 and 11:2).