Neverisms

or a stereo. If you do have to buy such items, pay cash.”

Never say bad things about yourself;

especially, never attribute to yourself irreversible negative traits,

like “stupid,” “ugly,” “uncreative,” “a failure,” “incorrigible.”PHILIP ZIMBARDO, in Shyness (1990)

four

Never Put Off Till Tomorrow What You Can Do Today

Classic Neverisms

Philip Dormer Stanhope, born in London in 1694, was groomed from childhood to become an English gentleman. When his father died in 1726, the thirty-two-year-old Lord Stanhope, as he was then known, assumed the hereditary title of his father, becoming the 4th Earl of Chesterfield. He was soon sworn in as a member of the House of Lords, a position he had long desired. Over the next half century, Lord Chesterfield became one of England’s most prominent figures. He is remembered to history, though, not for his public service, but for three decades’ worth of letters he wrote to his son.

In 1737, Chesterfield began writing letters to five-year-old Philip Stanhope, his only child. The boy was the result of an extramarital affair Chesterfield had with a French governess who lived in London. The child’s illegitimate status almost guaranteed that he would never be accepted by upper-class society, but Chesterfield arranged for him to be educated at the prestigious Westminster School. When Philip turned five, Chesterfield wrote him a letter about what to expect at school and what he might do to increase his chances of success. The letter-writing format proved so appealing to Lord Chesterfield that, over the next thirty-one years, he wrote his son more than a thousand letters, offering detailed advice on etiquette and good manners, observations about life and love, and insights about human nature that might advance a young gentleman’s career.

The correspondence continued until 1768, when young Stanhope died unexpectedly of edema (then called dropsy) at age thirty-six. Just before the funeral, the grieving father learned of his son’s marriage to a lower-class woman and, even more shockingly, of the existence of two grandsons. Chesterfield took the news with typical English aplomb, treating his son’s wife with courtesy and vowing to provide for the education of his grandchildren.

After Chesterfield’s death in 1773, extracts of his will were published in The Gentleman’s Magazine. While the wealthy nobleman provided for his grandsons, he left nothing to his son’s widow, Eugenia Stanhope. Distraught over an uncertain future, Mrs. Stanhope realized she had only one thing of value: a chest full of letters her husband had received from his famous father. She approached a respected London publisher, James Dodsley, and showed him her cache. In 1774, a year after Chesterfield’s death, Dodsley’s firm published Letters to His Son: On the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman. Once again, Lord Chesterfield was the talk of the town, as Londoners of every social class eagerly discussed the contents of a lengthy series of letters that were never intended for public consumption.

While London’s literary society admired the elegant way in which Chesterfield expressed himself, most Londoners were captivated by the racier advice, which included a recommendation that the son have affairs with upper-class English married women in order to improve his manners as well as his social standing. Dr. Samuel Johnson, long a Chesterfield critic, famously wrote that the letters “teach the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master.”

Despite Dr. Johnson’s dim view, many of Chesterfield’s rules of conduct and observations about life now enjoy an exalted status among word and language lovers. You’ll find other contributions from Lord Chesterfield in other chapters, but perhaps his most famous words appeared in a 1749 letter:

Know the true value of time;

snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it.

No Idleness; no laziness; no procrastination;

never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.

Chesterfield returned to the same theme in a 1754 letter:

Be alert and diligent in your little concerns;

never procrastinate,

never put off till tomorrow what you can do today;

and never do two things at a time.

Warnings about delaying today’s tasks until tomorrow had appeared centuries before Chesterfield wrote his letters. The basic idea showed up in one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in the late fourteenth century. By 1616, something very close to the modern version (“Deferre not untill to morrow, if thou canst do it to day”) was included in Adages, a collection of proverbial sayings by the English writer Thomas Draxe. By the eighteenth century the basic notion was so well established that a 1757 issue of Poor Richard’s Almanack advised, “Never leave that till to-morrow which you can do to-day.” To my knowledge, though, Lord Chesterfield was the first person to begin the admonition with the phrase never put off till tomorrow. His more compelling—and modern-sounding—version of the saying is the one that finally took hold and ultimately became the preferred way to express the thought. It is now regarded as a quotation classic.

The dictionary defines classic as “Belonging to the highest rank or class.” Just as there are classic cars, films, songs, and books, there are classic quotations—and Lord Chesterfield’s creation deserves the appellation. One of the best ways to determine if a quotation has achieved such a status is to examine the number of parodies and spin-offs it has inspired. On this criterion, Chesterfield’s line has few rivals. So far, I’ve identified more than three dozen attempts to piggyback on the original thought. Here are a few of my favorites:

Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow.HUMPHREY BOGART, as Charlie Allnut, in The African Queen (1951), adapted from the C. S. Forester novel; screenplay by James Agee

There is a maxim, “Never put off till to- morrow what you can do to-day.”

This is a maxim for sluggards. A better reading of it is,

“Never do to-day what you can as well do to-morrow;”

because something may occur to make you regret your premature action.AARON BURR, quoted in James Parton’s

Life and Times of Aaron Burr (1858)

Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have