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Mony a mickle makes a muckle
Ye auld scots saying
Said th’ Scot with a chuckle
When his kilt a slight snag got
Th’ one 100 Sterling bought
Soon his kilt wis sae threadbare
He hud na coverage down under there
Whaur na Scot wears underwear
“Mony a mickle makes a muckle” is an old Scottish saying that means, “Many little things make a big thing.“
I ran across the phrase in the book Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow.
A blogger named Jenny MacDonald wrote that her mother used the phrase and explained her use of it:
In August or September we’d go out there together, my mum and me, with empty ice-cream tubs to fill with berries from the brambles.
Nettle stings were a price worth paying for these tasty wild blackberries, they were sweet and sharp, with dark red juices that stained your hands.
Looking back, I guess that my mum was picking berries to take home, while I was picking berries to eat immediately. But if I did manage to put one into the pot instead of my mouth, she’d say ‘many a mickle makes a muckle’ and have a little chuckle.
Later on, when I asked her to explain, she’d pick up a well-thumbed copy of ‘Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.’ and explain that many a mickel makes a muckle was an old Scottish proverb that her nana passed down to her.
Jenny MacDonald on Medium. com
Maybe we should stop thinking of the little things we do and say as little. They all add up to big things, to the things that define us.
The small things can have such consequences that I am inclined to think there are no small things.
Just last evening, I was taking my wife to dinner at a catfish place near our house. I have pulled into the parking lot of that restaurant dozens of times and without incident. But this time, I spotted a parking spot near the front door but at an awkward angle to the parking lot entry. I cut my wheels too soon, not noting how far into the parking lot the curb jutted, hit the curb, went over it with my right front tire, and came down onto the asphalt with a sickening thud. I broke my expensive, retractable running board smooth off. In a fraction of a moment, I made one small miscalculation or failed to make one small observation and it cost me $1500.
Here is what George Washington wrote to Anthony Whitting, one of his managers at Mt. Vernon, in 1793. Washington was displeased with the work a carpenter under Whitting’s supervision was doing and at what expense, and the great General expressed it, in part, this way:
People are often ruined before they are aware of the danger, by buying everything they think they want, conceiving them to be trifles—without adverting to a Scottish adage—than which nothing in nature is more true—“that many mickles make a muckle.”
Mony a mickle makes a muckle.
Some say Washington got the phrase wrong, that mickle and muckle both mean large sums. Right or wrong in his linguistics, he was dead-on in his applications. Little things add up and become big deals.
Here is another illustration Jesus used: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed planted in a field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but it becomes the largest of garden plants; it grows into a tree, and birds come and make nests in its branches.”
Matthew 13:31-33
Jesus also used this illustration: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like the yeast a woman used in making bread. Even though she put only a little yeast in three measures of flour, it permeated every part of the dough.”