Who taught: Zac, Leah, Pat and Carol

do not upset the applecart

Suppose that you live in 100 years ago and, one day, organize a hand cart full of apples to sell them in your yard and suddenly I come in and upset the cart! You would be like, “Dude, what have you done? Everything was perfect and organized and now, all of it sudden, it is all ruined.” Yup! So, there is an expression, “upset the applecart.” Last night, Zac and Leah told me this expression and I looked at the origin of the expression. It goes pretty far back. Here is what I found from the Internet.

This phrase is first recorded by Jeremy Belknap in The History of New Hampshire, 1788: “Adams had almost overset the apple-cart by intruding an amendment of his own fabrication on the morning of the day of ratification” [of the Constitution].

So, as you can easily find out, this expression simply means, “to create a difficulty.”

A few days ago, Carol came to me to give me a book as a present. The title of the book is “Should you judge this book by its cover?” and the author is Julian Baggini. It is about 100 English sayings and quotations. I found one expression which has similar meaning to the applecart one.

“Let sleeping dogs lie!”

Interestingly, Pat used this expression a few weeks ago when he was talking about his work. Again, it means “do not make anything fine not fine.” Based on the book, this expression was first used in the late 14th century. The author also said,

Most people quite understandably do not like dealing with difficult problems and will seek any excuse to put off confronting them. It would be so much better if we could sort out our gravest difficulties when things are at their least, not most, tumultuous.

What do you think? Do you agree? In some sense, I do agree. But, I don’t know why, as I am getting older, I do think sometimes it is really better to let sleeping dogs lie. And, if you get lucky enough, there would be no bigger issues at all.