I just heard John Bell of the Iona Community on ‘Thought for the Day’. He was talking, since it’s St Andrew’s day, about the old Scottish saying, or toast, “Here’s tae us, wha’s like us? Damn few, and they’re a’ deid.” That’s, “Here’s to us, who’s like us? Damn few, and they’re all dead,” in case you have trouble with Scots.
Thing is, Bell was bemoaning the attitude he thinks it represents. He thinks it means, “The only people we can emulate are dead.” He thinks it epitomises a ‘national inferiority complex.’
That’s not how I ever understood it.
Rather than looking back wistfully on past glories, to me it was triumphal, celebratory, even arrogant, if you need a negative adjective. It said — it says — “We’re here, and we’re great; there’s no-one like us.”
So happy St Andrew’s day: we rock.
There was a P.K. Dick book/story where a person’s interpretation of various proverbs was used as a sanity test i.e. whether you viewed them in a positive or negative manner meant whether you were OK or got carted off somewhere. I once had a bit of a revelation about the old proverb ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed’ where my view changed.
Hi Chris,
I don’t remember that story, but there are many of Dick’s that I haven’t read.
Yes, I suppose ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed’ could be taken in a couple of different ways, at least. In fact, you’ve left me slightly confused about what its originally meaning was.