“I am confused,” Mary said sweetly.

In the airport the other evening, I heard a mom say to her young son as they walked by, “…because you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.”

This is an expression I also learned at my mother’s knee when I was about the same age as that boy — i.e., around seven. But it never occurred to me until I heard that mom to wonder how that expression ever came into being in the first place. I mean, who wants to catch flies? They are dirty, bothersome creatures and should keep to themselves.

Maybe the expression means, “If you want to squish flies, you can catch them more easily if you put out a plate of honey than if you put out a plate of vinegar.” But that is never what I understood it to mean. I always thought it meant that the goal was to catch flies.

I think this is just another one of those confusing adages wherein I understand the meaning but not the words.