Welcome to my new blog. New? Yes, I have started this as of today – January 31, 2016. I thought, why wait until the new month begins? Start today!

Much like in many of the goofy sayings I’ll be reviewing on this blog, “Start today!” comes as a slap in the face. What if someone doesn’t want to start today? What if he or she wants to sleep in on a Sunday, relax on the deck, and not publish his or her first blog post on this new blog? Well, what he or she needs is a wee bit of motivation to make it all begin! Act Now! Call Right Now! Change Your Life in Three Easy Steps! All of these are meant to motivate, push along, move ahead, get you going. Sometimes it works, but after twenty years of hearing all these sorts of thing, and feeling less and less motivated to do any of it, much less anything fun, I started thinking how I could use these goofy sayings for good. Kind of like a dictionary of sayings, of sorts, but with my own meanings. That’s the beauty of doing this on my own – not answering to some editor who makes me write it his way. Joy!

Now, some of these sayings, like today’s, are just something I’ve overhead that I had to question. Like I asked the person to repeat the phrase, just so I could perhaps better understand it. Kind of like College Algebra equations with xs and ys. Not goofy, just something I had never heard before.

The only sad thing about this blog is that I will eventually run out of these sayings, since I left the world of management about 15 months ago. So, that’s where you come in – send me your goofy management motivational interesting sayings, and I’ll translate them. I’ll even mention you in my blog if you include your first name and state or country when you send them to me at iheardsay@gmail.com.

So….wait for it….here we go.

To Be Translated: “I don’t know, but I heard say.”
Also Know As: “I don’t know, but I’ve heard say.”
Credited to: Cindy, Arkansas

This saying came to me in the fall of 1989. I was from a small town in northeast Arkansas, and I started college at Arkansas State University in the fall of that year. It was a huge melting pot of people, and it was a bit overwhelming to be dumped onto a campus that had about five times more people than my hometown. I met so many interesting folks that year, from the basketball player who bought us beer because she looked to be about 30 years old, to the gorgeous football player that I lovingly referred to (and still do) as #97, to my third college roommate that year. Yes, I went through two others, neither of whose leaving was my fault. One threw parties constantly in room 603, so I bailed and slept on the floor of roommate #3’s room until roommate #2’s room had an opening. #2 then left at semester, and roommate #3’s roommmate left as well, leaving us paired up in Room 616.

She was from a small (like smaller than my small) town in straight-up northern Arkansas (as opposed to eastern straight-up northern). From what I recall, and it’s been a while so bear with me on the details, we were in a heavy discussion one evening about what we all thought about a certain subject. Ideas were tossed about like dice on a table, and Cindy, somewhat exasperated, finally said, “I don’t know, but I heard say.” She could have said “I don’t know, but I’ve heard say,” I honestly don’t remember which it was. This stopped the conversation cold. I don’t think any of us had heard this phrase before that moment, other than Cindy, and of course, my inquisitive brain pondered on it, given the college-imbibing state in which my mind was stuck, sure that I had come up with the answer. I thought she meant that she’d heard something before that sounded like what we were talking about. I was, apparently, a little off.

Cindy explained this phrase to me, and I’ve actually used it hundreds of times since.

Translation: I am really not sure of the exact answer to this philosophical dilemma. I once heard someone talking about it, and I think he said XYZ about it, but I’m not exactly sure. I’m pretty sure I’m right in thinking this way, because the someone who said XYZ about it was pretty knowledgeable, or seemingly anyway. In other words, I’ve heard about this before, and based on what I heard and translated, along with my own intuition, I think XYZ applies.

Yes, the translation is always longer than the phrase. Perhaps that’s why people come up with these analogies in everyday life – to give the rest of us an example of what something might mean, without saying what it means outright. Instead of “I don’t like you,” one could, for instance say, “I like you about as much as a mouse likes a mousetrap.” Get it?

Stay tuned for more fun.