“My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained.” — Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
“Our own counsel we will keep on who is ready.” — Yoda, The Phantom Menace (1998)
What’s depressing about this is not so much that George Lucas doesn’t know what keeping one’s own counsel means,* as that in eighteen years no one had the courage to tell Lucas he’d made a mistake.
* Lucas evidently think keeping one’s own counsel means deciding for oneself, when it actually means keeping one’s thoughts and plans to oneself. And when you’re in the middle of explaining that you think someone is not ready to be trained, you are precisely not keeping your thoughts to yourself on the matter.
It just occurs to me that I’ve been misusing the damn phrase all my life. Evidently, no one had the courage to tell me, either.
Courage? Knowledge? What’s the difference?
Courage is the knowledge of future goods and evils. Or so I hear.