Meaning & Analysis
A child who gets teeth (is 'toothed') at an early age will die young and soon be 'with God'. It is a folk superstition linking precocious development to a short lifespan.
Insights
Precocity and Doom
The proverb serves as a broader metaphor for the idea that anything that develops or matures unnaturally quickly is fragile and doomed to a short existence. It's a warning that rapid, seemingly impressive growth can be a sign of instability rather than strength.
Fate and Predestination
It reflects a fatalistic worldview where a person's ultimate fate is sealed by signs visible from their earliest moments. The early tooth is not a cause but an omen of an unalterable destiny, highlighting a belief system in which human life follows a predetermined path.
The Danger of the Unnatural
The proverb symbolizes a suspicion of things that deviate from the expected norm. Early teething is an anomaly, and the proverb captures a deep-seated cultural fear that the unusual or extraordinary is a harbinger of misfortune.
Historical Infant Mortality
This proverb must be understood within the historical context of extremely high infant and child mortality. It reflects a folk attempt to find a cause or sign for what was a frequent, tragic, and often inexplicable event, thereby creating a semblance of predictability in a precarious world.
Folk Belief and Superstition
The proverb is a classic example of superstition, where a biological anomaly (precocious teething) is interpreted as a supernatural omen. It reveals a pre-scientific worldview that viewed deviations from the natural order with suspicion and fear, rather than as simple biological variance.
Psychological Coping Mechanism
For grieving parents, this belief could have served as a psychological coping mechanism. By framing a child's death as fated from an early sign, it may have helped to mitigate parental guilt, attributing the loss to destiny or God's will rather than to inadequate care or random chance.
Cultural Fear of Precocity
The saying reveals a cultural anxiety surrounding precocity. Unlike modern sensibilities that often celebrate early development, this proverb treats it as an unnatural and dangerous sign, suggesting that which develops too fast is not destined to last.
Rhetorical Devices
Parallelism
The proverb is built on a balanced, parallel structure ('Soon X, soon Y'), creating a strong, memorable cause-and-effect relationship between the two clauses.
Rhyme
The internal rhyme between 'todd' (a dialectal form of 'toothed') and 'God' gives the proverb a concise, resonant, and almost incantatory quality, making it easy to remember and pass down.
Euphemism
The phrase 'with God' is a gentle, religious euphemism for death, softening the stark and tragic nature of the prediction about a child's early demise.
Repetition
The repetition of the word 'soon' emphasizes the direct and swift connection between the sign (early teeth) and the outcome (death), reinforcing the sense of inevitability.
Transcription
Quotations
*A Northern Proverb when a child hath teeth too soon.
Quickly too'd, [i.e. toothed] and quickly go, Quickly will thy mother have moe.
Some have it quickly to'd, quickly with God, as if early breeding of teeth, were a sign of short life, whereas we read of some born with teeth in their heads, who yet have lived long enough to become famous men.
Annotations
- toothed
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.