Motherwell and Rangers footballers in a proverbially wearying display

In the wake of the post-game Rangers and Motherwell “stramash” (great old Scottish word) on Sunday, I suppose it was inevitable that an old proverbial saying was trotted out.

A radio commentator said: “Two wrongs don’t make a right”, referring to one silly footballer reciprocating with a kick and a punch after being pushed by another silly footballer.

And he was correct. But I have to admit I get a trifle weary of proverbs. Some of them are very good, very interesting, very true but an awfully high proportion shouldn’t be called proverbs at all, they would be better given one of two other terms: the bleeding obvious or the utterly useless!

For an example of the bleeding obvious, we’ll start with: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. Really?

And: “Tomorrow is another day”. Oh is it? Tomorrow isn’t going to be a fudge doughnut then? Who would have thought it.

Then there are the useless. “You are what you eat”. No, sorry, you are not. I would be a cheeseburger.

Or: “Truth is stranger than fiction”. No. Sorry. It isn’t. Before I was very old I’d seen movies that featured an elephant with ears so large it could fly, a deer fawn that talked English to a rabbit and the legend of Robin Hood in which Robin was a fox, Little John was a bear and Good King Richard was a lion.

Even though I’d only had four or five summers, I worked out what was truth and what was fiction and what was strange.

And: “Actions speak louder than words”. That’s possibly true, the actions of certain Rangers and Motherwell footballers on Sunday said: “I can’t control my temper”.

I suspect a good proportion of my antipathy towards proverbs is that when people speak them out loud, they tend to think they have just said something wonderfully profound and often pause for a moment, give you a “look” that says they have cured all your ills and solved all your problems.

But if they have said “Never look a gift horse in the mouth” then, honestly, what use is that? I don’t know where I would keep a horse, whether it was a gift or not. And I’m not sure what I should be looking for if I peered into its mouth anyway.

Similarly: “Handsome is as handsome does”. Are you trying to tell me that ugly people become good-looking if they do nice things? That’s going to put plastic surgeons out of business then, surely?

Or “Fight fire with fire”. I’ve not examined every fire extinguisher on the planet, but I’m fairly sure there won’t be many that spray flames when attempting to do their job.

My least favourite of all proverbs is: “Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves”.

Frankly, it just doesn’t work. I have often thought I was being very clever by buying the soap powder in the supermarket that was 14p cheaper than the one next to it on the shelf . . . and then bought £10 worth of Lottery tickets that I know have so little chance of winning I’d be as well making a paper aeroplane out of my tenner and throwing it into the air to see if it can hit a passing flying pig made of diamonds.

Now I know, before you tell me, that I am taking all these proverbs too literally. I should try to look beyond the mere words and glean the meaning underneath.

But, frankly, wouldn’t we be better off dispensing with the gibberish and just saying what we really mean? Instead of being told to fight fire with fire, we could just say: “Do exactly to him as he has done to you”.

Which, in the case of certain footballers, would appear to mean: “Act like a four-year-old”.