saying about stupid people — how to write one without insulting anyone, in 6 steps

the genre runs out of good ones around the third minute of any internet rabbit hole. fool me once, can’t fix stupid, common sense isn’t common. they recycle. they grow tired. how to invent a new one without falling into the same lazy template is harder than it looks. i tried. notes from the attempt follow.

it is 1:38pm on a tuesday. carla is upstairs in the q3 review on the third floor, taking notes for a slide nobody will read. i have approximately the rest of the morning. on the desk in front of me there is a foolscap pad, a kettle that doesn’t quite click off, and a list, in pencil, of things i have heard people say about stupid people this week alone. the list is depressing. not because the takes are mean. because the takes are recycled.

so i’m going to try, in the next forty minutes and over six small steps, to invent a new one. a new saying about stupid people that doesn’t sound like every other one. and i’m going to show my work, which is the only honest way to do this.

writing a saying about stupid people, step one — identify the behavior, not the person

the first thing every bad saying does is point at a person. stupid people do X. stupid people don’t Y. the person is the subject of the sentence and the verb is a verdict. this is, technically, slander, and also, more importantly, lazy.

the better version names the behavior. behaviors are observable. behaviors can be timed and counted. behaviors don’t have feelings, which is a relief, because i don’t want to insult anyone today. i’m low on social credit as it is.

example, drafted on the foolscap pad at 10:18am: “the man who explains his own joke twice has a problem the joke does not have.” you’ll notice it doesn’t say stupid anywhere. the word does not need to be in the sentence for the sentence to be about it. that’s the whole trick. the saying about stupid people that works hardest is the one that never uses the word stupid.

HT30 covered the financial version of this — “ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy.” ignorance is the behavior. therapy is the verdict the behavior earns. nobody got called names. everyone got described.

step two, anchor the saying in a domain you know

the second thing bad sayings do is float. they reach for the universal — life, men, the world, society — without naming a single object you could pick up and throw. a saying about stupid people that mentions society is a saying about nothing.

so anchor it. pick a domain you actually live in. mine, today, are: the office, the kitchen, the supermarket aisle with the wrong-sized milk, the tax form i’m pretending isn’t due. each of these is a small lab. each one produces, weekly, a perfectly observed behavior i could mint into a sentence.

example, drafted at 10:23am: “in any meeting, the person who restates the question instead of answering it is also the person who scheduled the meeting.” that’s a saying about stupid people that nobody can prove is about them, because it’s about a meeting, which is a thing, not a person. and yet anyone who has been in a meeting recognizes the figure being described.

this is also where the seventh microwave i have killed becomes useful. anchor your saying in a microwave and it survives the news cycle. anchor it in a vague human flaw and it dies on contact.

step three, drop the universal claim

now, let me say something clearly, and write this down because it’s the part most people skip. do not claim the saying applies to everyone, always, forever. the second a saying about stupid people promises universality, it becomes a bumper sticker. and the bumper sticker is where good sentences go to die.

the moves to delete: always, everyone, nobody, the world, people who. the moves to keep: often, most of the time, in my experience, at the bar i go to, the kind who.

watch the difference. bad: “stupid people always think they’re the smartest in the room.” better: “in most rooms, the loudest theory came from the person who showed up last.” same observation. one is universal and slappable. the other is local and forgivable. the local one is the saying about stupid people that ages well — the universal one has already aged poorly, and i wrote it eight seconds ago.

step four, test it on a friendly bartender, hypothetically

at this point i would, in a perfect world, take the draft saying down to mike at the corner bar and read it to him at a normal speaking volume. mike has a system for taxes — has not filed since 2019 — and his standard is brutal. if mike laughs, the saying lives. if mike says okay, the saying dies.

but it is currently 10:31am on a tuesday and the bar is closed. so i’m going to do the next best thing, which is the bartender simulation in my head. i picture mike with a rag in his hand. i picture him not looking up. i read him the sentence. i listen for the silence.

this is, by the way, not stefan-grade methodology. stefan, the wine man in a vest, would object. stefan would want a panel. stefan would want a rubric. but stefan once told me a wine had notes of forest floor, in front of forrest gump‘s entire fan base, with a straight face, so i don’t take notes from stefan on what counts as a real test. forrest’s mama had a saying about stupid people too — “stupid is as stupid does” — and you’ll notice that one passes step one (behavior, not person) on the first reading. that’s why it’s still in circulation.

step five and six, polish the rhythm and ship it

the saying about stupid people that survives a year is not the smartest one. it is the one with the best rhythm. three beats is the floor. mark twain’s “never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience” works because of the swing — argue, drag, beat. three verbs, escalating. einstein’s attributed line about “two things are infinite” works because of the pause at the comma. you read it and you have to stop. that’s the rhythm doing the work.

so step five is read your draft out loud. count the beats. if it has fewer than three, add one. if it has more than five, kill one. if it doesn’t have a pause anywhere, insert one with a comma, even if the grammar squeaks.

step six is, simply, ship it. write it on a foolscap pad. put it on a wall, metaphorically. say it once at a wedding. it’s not yours after the second telling anyway. sayings about stupid people belong to whoever repeats them, which is part of what makes them sayings. you only get to be the first person who said it. and only briefly.

here’s mine, drafted at the desk at 1:38pm, polished twice, untested on mike: “the smartest person in the room is usually the one who turned around to see who you were talking about.” i hope it survives. it probably won’t. it will be replaced, by wednesday next week, by a better one.

verdict, the saying writes the speaker more than the subject

so. six steps. one foolscap pad. one cold kettle. one draft saying that may or may not survive contact with mike, who is closed until five. and one private discovery, which is that every saying about stupid people you have ever loved tells you something about the person who said it first, including especially mine.

if you came here looking for the cluster pillar — the longer reading on the whole stupid question — that’s at stupid. if you came here looking for the practical follow-on, the etymology side is at what stupid actually means, which i wrote on a different morning, with carla in a different meeting, with the same kettle.

that’s six steps. that’s one saying. that’s the rest of the morning, gone.

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