Maxim (max’-im): One of several terms describing short, pithy sayings. Others include adage, apothegm, gnome, paroemia, proverb, and sententia.
“A wise dog keeps its nose to the ground.” This proverb was passed down through our family. Its meaning was lost sometime around the beginning of the 20th century. By the time I first heard it nobody knew whether it originated on my mother’s or my father’s side of the family. My mother was German-English. My father was Viking—that’s all he would tell us. His name was Ragnar and he was bipolar and often ran amok. When he was amok, he would break things and got into fights at the corner bar, “Lefty’s.” Lefty had lost his right hand in WWII when it was run over by a tank on D-Day. He was able to use his veterans’ benefits to open “Lefty’s” and make a good living. Dad’s brawls would always get him banned from “Lefty’s” for a week. During his exile, Dad would stand outside “Lefty’s” giving everybody the finger as they went in. My father’s ancestors were lost in time. His mother and father abandoned him when he was an infant. He was raised in an orphanage—nobody wanted him because he was unruly and would spit at possible adoptive parents when they came to meet him. He worked assembling spiral notebooks until he was 16 and put out on his own. He wanted to be a professional boxer, but he hated getting hit. So, he went to work for the telephone company. He fought in WWII and lost most of his hearing.
I never quite figured out how my mother expressed her ethnicity. She had OCD. I figured that was from the German side of her family. We traced her German lineage back to Bavaria. Her great-great, great grandfather was known as Herman Barnshovel. On her mother’s side, we traced her great, great, great, grandmother back to Dublin, where she was a spy for the British. Her name was Mary O’Stale. Evidently, she was awarded a medal by the Crown, and sent to Bavaria for her own safety, where she met Herman. She got a job in a strudel factory, at the behest of the British Crown. Mary and Herman settled in Munich and had 11 children.
I took up an interest in genealogy after I graduated from college with a degree in anthropology. I would spend the post-graduation summer seeing what I could find out about the origins of the family proverb. I couldn’t find out anything about the family proverb by researching my father’s ancestors—they were forever gone. But, Dublin and Munich could be starting points.
Mary O’Stale was impossible to track down given her secret life and the alias she lived under as a spy. It was off to Munich. “Barnshovel” is a rare name, so Herman was pretty easy to find. This I didn’t know: He was seriously wounded in a taxi-horse stable when rustlers attacked and stole the horses while he was shoveling shit. He had irritated the rustlers when he shook his shovel at them and called them “dummkopfs“. He was wounded in the upper arm. Weirdly, there was a picture of him in the newspaper captioned “Shitshoveller Wounded” (Shitshovellr Verwundetsitting). He was sitting in a hospital bed wearing a t-shirt. The family proverb was tattooed in German on his forearm; “Ein kluger Hund hält seine Nase am Boden.” Eureka! I needed to do more research to see if I could find the origins of the proverb. I found that Herman had a Beagle named Beethoven that he trained to chase rabbits and run field trials. Of course keeping “their nose to the ground” is necessary for the hound’s success in sniffing out rabbits. As a metaphor it is similar to keeping your nose to the “grindstone.”
When I got back to the States, I bought a Beagle and got a tattoo on my forearm of the family proverb in the original German: “Ein kluger Hund hält seine Nase am Boden.” I’m having a family crest made, and my sister is considering getting tattooed too.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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