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Ready to spark something? Download the Sims 4 and play for free. Welcome to another podcast edition of Away With Words. I'm Grant Barrett.

During the long hot New York summer I did a lot of reading and I must tell you there are two kinds of books you should

avoid at all cost. These dangerous treacherous books are books of quotations and

books of aphorisms. If you fail to heed my warning you will be drawn as I have been

deeper into spiraling worlds of short pithy sayings that trigger one aha moment after another.

Here's where it started. I flipped open the Yale Book of

quotations where I found that editor Fred Shapiro has traced the expression,

the customer is always right. It turns out that Cesar Ritz, yes, the famous hotelier, said in 1908,

Le Cliont-Majamaitour, which actually translates into English as the customer is never wrong. Being always right and never wrong

are not the same thing at all. The former promotes imperiousness, capriciousness,

and a monopoly on righteousness. The latter still allows the establishment to be right, even if the customer is also right.

After some long while, after I'd made several lists of a dozen other ways the French and English-speaking worlds vary ever so slightly,

but ever so significantly, I realized I still had the quotations book in my lap.

One short quote, and off I had gone on an adventure.

It was the same story with James Geary's guide to the world's great aphorists.

It reinforced my own belief that an aphorism is like a small fruit of which you can eat both the flesh and the hearts you'd like truth inside.

I came upon this line from Russian comic actor Faina Ranafskaya.

One should live his life in such a way that even bastards remember him.

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