Say What: Physician, heal thyself/The cobbler always wears the worst shoes

[mab-browne.livejournal.com]

Today, we're looking at two old sayings - "Physician, heal thyself," and "The cobbler always wears the worst shoes." Our fannish examples come from Jim and Blair of The Sentinel.

Our first saying is from the Bible, Luke 4:23, to be precise. The full quote is as follows:

And he said unto them, Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself: whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thy country.

In the context of the Bible quote, Jesus is expected to perform the same miracles in his home town as he did in other places. He's quoting an old familiar saying to his listeners, as is often the case in the New Testament gospels. A sick doctor isn't much of an advertisement for his or her skills in healing others, either now or two thousand years ago.

This has become a quote for when you think someone is paying too much attention to the faults of others and not enough attention to their own.

Blair sidled up to Jim and eyed the whiskey in Jim's glass. "Are you sure that's going to mix okay with your senses, man?"

Jim took a small sip. "Who was holding your hair back from your face a couple of weeks ago? Physician, heal thyself."

The origins of our second saying are a little harder to track down. I hadn't met this version before undertaking this post. The version that I'm familiar with is the cobbler's children have no shoes. Wandering the internet suggests that this saying may be a continental import into English, as it appears in the form of "the cobbler wears the worst shoes" in French.

The cobbler, if a wise cobbler, is going to put plenty of effort into the shoes that he makes to sell. His livelihood depends on a quality product. But the shoes that he makes for himself (or his family members) at the end of the day when he's tired may not meet quite the same high standards, and they don't need to. It's human nature to put in less effort when less is at stake.

"I cleaned offices for a while when I was an undergrad," Blair said.

"You?" Jim's remembrances of Blair's egregious sins against the loft's high standards of cleanliness were written all over his face, and Blair grinned and shrugged.

"It was different getting paid for it. The cobbler always wears the worst shoes, right?"

Both these quotes deal with that ever common concern in human relations - the difference between our public and our private behaviour.