One for Sorrow by Chloe Rhodes

pockets.
    In the early 1700s Lewis Duncombe (1711-1730) translated – or interpreted – the Latin tag ‘ De minumus maxima ’ (‘out of little [comes] great’) as ‘The lofty oak from a small acorn grows’, and in 1732 the proverb appeared in Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia as:

    The greatest Oaks have been little
    Acorns.

    In 1797 the American newspaper proprietor and poet David Everett wrote a rhyming speech to be recited by a child at a school presentation in a version closer to the one we use today:

    Large streams from little fountains
    flow,
    Tall oaks from little acorns grow.

    Another old proverb about the oak strikes a cautionary note: ‘A reed before the wind lives on, while mighty oaks do fall’. Such an event would have been observed by many – and it was the subject of one of Æsop’s fables, in which a great oak is uprooted by the wind and thrown down among some reeds. It asks them how they, so light and weak, are not broken by the wind, to which they reply, ‘You fight and contend with the wind, and consequently you are destroyed; while we on the contrary bend before the least breath of air, and therefore remain unbroken, and escape.’
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Don’t buy a pig in a poke
    It sounds an unlikely thing for anyone to do in this day and age, but themedieval marketplace was full of traders touting their livestock, and for subsistence-level farmers transporting goods in a poke (bag or sack inmodern English), was often the only way they could get their wares to town. This phrase is a reference to the less scrupulous among them who would claim that their bag held a fresh suckling pig when in fact what was inside was a long way past its best, or worse still, not a pig at all. Versions of this phrase from other parts of Europe reveal that sometimes the worthless body of a dog or cat would be substituted; in French, Danish, German and Polish, the phrase translates as ‘Don’t buy a cat in a sack’, while in Spain the warning is even more blunt: ‘Hay gato encerrado’ , meaning simply ‘There is a cat stuck inside.’
    The phrase became a warning not to fall foul of a conman in the marketplace and appeared in John Heywood’s Epigrammes in 1555 as:

    I will neuer bye the pyg in the poke: 
Thers many a foule pyg in a feyre
cloke.

    Later the proverb was applied to transactions of all kinds and cautioned people to make sure they knew exactly what they were getting in return for their cash. In other words, caveat emptor , to use the Latin maxim – ‘let the buyer beware’. These days we sometimes use the phrase retrospectively, perhaps saying that a business venture that wasn’t all it was cracked up to be ‘turned out to be a pig in a poke’.
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The proof of the pudding is in the eating
    This seventeenth-century adage applies the wisdom of the experienced country cook to the challenges presented by life in general. It suggests that just as a pudding must be tasted before it can be declared good, any course of action can only be judged a success once it has been carried out.
    It first appeared in print as ‘All the proof of a pudding is in the eating,’ in William Camden’s  Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britaine  (third edition, 1623), which was a miscellaneous collection of facts, homilies and historical titbits left over from Camden’s Britannia , his more scholarly study of the British Isles and Ireland.
    In Camden’s day of course, the ‘pudding’ in question would have been a more savoury affair than the sweet treats we now associate with the word. Medieval puddings were usually made by stuffing the stomach (or intestine) of a sheep or pig with suet, minced meat, oatmeal and a selection of spices, tying the ends together and boiling it. Traditionally prepared haggis is the only true pudding to have survived from