When Vince Lombardi said, "Winning isn't
everything; it's the only thing," he didn't say anything great. He didn't
say anything at all. There's nothing outside of everything, nothing for him to
be talking about. The only people he'll impress will be those who pay no
attention to what words mean.
Since there can't be any of those working for
newspapers let's assume the people on the nation's sports desks are just
pretending to be impressed and go on to what Lombardi has really given us: the
minimum requirement for a great saying. It has to say something.
So on a scale of 1 to 10 Lombardi's quote gets a 1.
What would a 10 be? I'll nominate what an unnamed Russian came up with when
Count Munster asked him to characterize his country's kind of government:
"absolutism tempered by assassination." This was the time of the
czars. This wonderful Russian has taken a word from the world of compromise and
political parties and dropped it into that world's opposite. "Yes, we in
our absolute monarchy modify, mitigate, and adjust too. We periodically knock
off the monarch."
It's that switch in worlds that pulls a quote into
the 10 bracket. A 9 will tickle you to death but a 10 will tickle you in more
ways. When that clever Russian stole that word he mapped the whole barbarous
East onto the enlightened West. He provided a hundred points of comparison. And
the more you knew the more you were tickled. There in your mind's eye could be
Peter the Great, strangling with his own hands rivals that threatened his
throne. There could be Dostoevsky's divine madman, scorning the temperate
reasoner.
You call up the pictures, yes, but with the knowing
use of "tempered" you get a statement: "I know all that. I know
your vocabulary. I know it well enough to play with it." The Russian
answers the German count's question from a point superior to either world.
Imagine, doing all that with one word! But there's
still more. The low-key usage shows us that the man is reconciled to his
position. He's not going to rage at his country's absolutism, not even going to
side against it. He's going to remain a Russian. But he's wearily aware of what
that's costing him.
How do we know that, that he's wearily aware? By his
tone. "Tempered" is used wryly. It adds an "alas" to his
answer. And there's the final tickle. The man who answers the question, this
man of the barbarous East, is at least as sophisticated as the man who asks it.
All right, there's a 10, the perfect dive in the
verbal Olympics. It shows us what all 10s have to have: a world-switch. Not
every world-switch will get you a 10, but if you don't have it you'll have to
settle for a 9.
What does a 9 look like? This: Somebody asks you if
you believe in baptism. You say, "Believe in it? I've seen it done!"
You've got a terrific world-switch. The questioner is in the world of Christian
theology, asking where you stand on the efficacy of a sacrament. The answerer
is in the world of skeptical scientific inquiry, and he takes the question to
be coming from a fellow in that world. Switcheroo! The last person the
questioner wants to hear from is a fellow rushing out of the laboratory, or the
jungle, declaring that such rumored things really do happen.
OK, why isn't that a 10? You can't fault the leap it
takes. The distance from Heinrich Bullinger (in baptism God cleanses and adopts
children) to Nietzsche (can you believe that such things are still believed?)
is about as far as the human mind can jump. So there's no doubt about the
impact. And there's no doubt about how it has registered. The fact that the
quote has been attributed, at various times, to William James, George Bernard
Shaw, and G. K. Chesterton is testimony to that. On impact it makes it. It's on
distribution, I think, that it falls short. Think of the number of places that
Russian hit us.
But it's not an easy call to make, and there are
many other factors — too many, I see, to assess in one post.
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