Honey catches more flies than vinegar. Background to a proverb (1)
‘I really should get out more often’, in the words of the traditional self-depreciating sign-off by writers of letters to Private Eye that correct some trivial mistake. But lockdown has not yet been entirely unlocked so there isn’t much point. In this state of self-imposed semi-incarceration the thrill of finding a rare proverb being used in a current source is vastly magnified until it’s as intensely pleasurable as that first glug of champagne or the sight of a flaming sunset.
Imagine, then, if you will, my electric excitement upon reading ‘You catch more flies with honey than vinegar and you catch more readers with good prose than bad.’1
More exciting still, if that is possible without the top of my head spinning right off, is what a bit of research on the jolly old Interweb throws up.
Some proverbs surely most everyone knows, like ‘A stitch in time saves nine’.2 (But then again, I may be making a middle-aged assumption.) Others are less well known but not unknown, such as ‘Half a loaf is better than no bread’. And then there are the vanishingly rare or obscure ones such as ‘There is reason in the roasting of eggs’ (1659, every action has a reason, no matter how bizarre that action seems) and ‘Honey catches more flies than vinegar’ and its variants, meaning, gentle speech and tact achieve more than criticism or reprimand – a truth a certain Home Secretary might be advised to bear in mind. Not to mention gazillions of people on social media.
As with many proverbs, it seems to be an import from another language. In 1666, Giovanni Torriano, a well-known teacher of Italian ensconced in London, published a collection of proverbs titled Piazza universale di proverbi Italiani, or, A common place of Italian proverbs and proverbial phrases digested in alphabetical order. Short titles were clearly not a thing in them days. Included in it was:
Honey gets more flyes to it, than doth viniger
the Italian for which Torriano gave as Il mele catta più mosche, che non fà l’aceto3 (literally ‘The honey catches more flies than not does the vinegar’). Earlier than that, as the OED and The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs make clear, there was a French version, noted in a 1624 source: souvenez‐vous que l’on prends plus de mouches avec une cuillerée de miel qu’avec cent barils de vinaigre ‘remember that one catches more flies with a spoonful of honey than with a hundred barrels of vinegar’.
That French version is clearly mirrored in the next OED citation, the which4 is only natural, given that the source in question is a translation from French:
A Man catches more Flies with one spoonful of Honey, than twenty Tun of Vineger.
tr. H. de Péréfixe de Beaumont Coll. Brave Actions & Memorable SayingsKing Henry the Great 51
This is tun meaning ‘a large barrel or cask’.
In its ‘standard’ form Honey catches more flies than vinegar is first cited in the OED as being from the 1766 edition of the book that popularised a put-down, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, though the phrase Goody Two-Shoes itself is several decades older (1687).
But older than that OED citation is the appearance of the phrase in a work by Benjamin Franklin, in the 1744 edition of his annual almanack Poor Richard:
Tart Words make no Friends: a spoonful of honey will catch more flies than Gallon of Vinegar.
Preceding it was the wise old saw
If you’d lose a troublesome Visitor, lend him Money.
while ‘Make haste slowly’ follows.
Another great American also made use of our vinegary wisdom. In an address to the Temperance Society in 1842, Abraham Lincoln enjoined his listeners thusly,5 adding alliteration into the bargain:
When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a ‘drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.’ So with men.
The most up-to-date citation in the OED references another great American statesman:
Obama seems to have added honey to his arsenal in dealing with foreign leaders, and the old adage says that honey catches more flies than vinegar.
2009 Austin (Texas) Amer.-Statesman (Nexis) 1 May a10
1. Laura Freeman, ‘Painted Out’, Spectator, 1 May 2021.
2. As regards frequency, in one corpus ‘a stitch in time…’ appeared 33 times, ‘half a loaf’ 27 times and ‘honey catch more flies’ once, in a misquotation of the Lincoln version.
3. A proverb that illustrates two facets of Italian: a) the use of the definite article for uncount nouns being different from English; and b) the use of the ‘pleonastic’ non, which is explained here.
4. It would be a good idea to revive this antiquated English usage: it makes it unambiguous that the reference is to the whole preceding clause.
5. If you are the kind of reader whom thusly made sit up and take notice, that was my intention. Though often derided, thusly is recorded in dictionaries, with or without a label.
References:
“honey, n. and adj.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/88159. Accessed 13 May 2021.
‘Quote For The Day’, The Atlantic, 11 March 2010. https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/03/quote-for-the-day/189425/ (accessed 13 May 2021).
Freeman, Laura (2021). ‘Painted Out’, Spectator, 1 May 2021. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-should-art-have-ever-been-considered-a-male-preserve- (accessed 13 May 2021)
