Tuesday night at the dinner table we got to talking about wasting food, and Mr. Morgan said, "Waste not, want not." Claire replied, "My teacher says that all the time."
Mr. Morgan inquired, "Do you know what it means--what the word 'want' means in this instance?"
Claire definitively told us, "It means 'if you don't want it, don't waste it.'"
Interesting, I never thought about the fact that "want" is being used in the sense of "lack" in this saying. I always took the saying to mean something like - if you are wasteful, and then later you want to have some of what you wasted but you can't because you wasted it and it's all gone, then you have no one to blame but yourself. I know see that the real meaning makes much more sense.
ReplyDelete-Jeff