Post History
"The best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry" comes from Robert Burns's To a Mouse. It is a commonly used expression, though the "mice and men" part is often omitted nowadays. In fact, not ever...
#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-12T21:57:38Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/43962 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T11:29:39Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/43962 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
"The best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry" comes from Robert Burns's _To a Mouse_. It is a commonly used expression, though the "mice and men" part is often omitted nowadays. In fact, not every person using the expression would be aware of its provenance. "The burned hand teaches best" comes from J.R.R. Tolkien's _The Lord of the Rings_. I have heard it used independently, but Google still points only to Tolkien. It has not yet become an independent expression coined by Tolkien - it's still a quote. People using the expression independently might find it useful to describe situations (indeed, there is a very similar expression in Hebrew, dating back to [Rashi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashi)), but those people are usually Tolkien fans and children of Tolkien fans - they might use the expression, but their first encounter with it can be traced to Tolkien. When does "The burned hand teaches best" become "The best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry"? When does an expression or a figure of speech acquire an independence from it's author, and become "coined by" rather than a quote?
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2019-03-23T12:46:38Z (over 5 years ago)
Original score: 3