Meaning & Analysis
Having fallen into an unfavorable deal or situation, salvage what you can and turn it to the best possible advantage.
Insights
Damage control
Treats adversity like a contract already signed: you may not escape it, but you can limit losses, recover value, and steer toward a tolerable outcome.
Cognitive reframing
Encourages revaluing the given facts—accentuating benefits, suppressing futility—so that morale and practical options expand under constraint.
Stoic pragmatism
Distinguishes what can be changed from what cannot; by accepting the ‘bad’ as fixed, energy shifts from complaint to improvement.
Ingenuity under scarcity
Invites craft and improvisation—repurpose, repair, renegotiate—showing how skill can wring service from meager means.
Reputation management
Even when outcomes are poor, dignified conduct and clear-headed mitigation protect one’s credit and relationships, which are long-run assets.
Paradiastole and spin
Puttenham names ‘paradiastole’—relabeling qualities to cast them in a favorable light—captured in ‘make the best of a bad thing.’ The proverb straddles honest thrift and rhetorical varnish: either practical improvement or mere gloss.
From bargain to market
Early uses shift from a single ‘bargain’ to the wider ‘market’: not just one bad deal but hostile conditions. Pepys’s phrasing (‘a bad market’) frames adversity as systemic, not just personal misjudgment.
Assay of character
Bad terms test virtue more than good terms do; patience, industry, and tact become the tools of recovery, turning mischance into a proving ground of steadiness.
Sunk-cost sentinel
Salvaging is not the same as doubling down. The wisdom is to stop hemorrhage, reap residual value, and disengage cleanly—guarding against the sunk-cost fallacy.
Kin maxims
Neighbors ‘the best of a bad job,’ ‘take it at the best,’ and ‘ill ware is never cheap’: together they warn that low quality bites twice—first at purchase, then in repair—so mitigation and future prudence must go hand in hand.
Stoic and civic echoes
Stoic counsel (premeditation of evils, consent to necessity) underwrites the line; in civic life, leaders ‘take up a mangled matter at the best,’ stabilizing the common good despite imperfect choices.
Rhetorical Devices
Antithesis
Opposes ‘best’ and ‘bad’ to dramatize the art of extracting good from ill, a friction that energizes the counsel.
Paradiastole
Revalues a negative by redescribing it—‘bad bargain’ becomes an occasion for skill—showing how naming can shift action.
Alliteration
The b-cluster—‘best,’ ‘bad,’ ‘bargain’—gives the proverb punch and mnemonic grip.
Commercial metaphor
Life’s reverses are cast as trade: deals, markets, credit. The concrete marketplace makes the abstract tactic memorable.
Ellipsis
Leaves methods unstated (‘make the best’ how?), inviting situational ingenuity rather than prescribing a single fix.
Transcription
Quotations
The figure Paradia-stole . . we call the Curry-fauell, as when we make the best of a bad thing.
Of this spilt water, hee gathered up as much as he could, making the best of a bad bargaine.
(to H. Oxinden, July 3) : He must nowe make the best off a bad cause.
I . . therefore am resolved to make the best of a bad market.
But when it came to the Worst at last, the Dog had the Wit we see, to make the Best of a Bad Game.
Let's make the best of a bad Market; pop into a Coach;—Drive to a Tavern, and drink away Sorrow.
(Market).
Shakespeare Citations
Good Brabantio, Take up this mangled matter at the best.
His own impatience Takes from Aufidius a great part of blame. Let's make the best of it.
Annotations
- Since you have faln into a troublesome Business, mend it by your Cunning and Industry.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.