"'Extremes meet', as the whiting said with its tail in its mouth"
About this Quote
A proverb strolls in promising wisdom; Hood sends it back out wearing a fish as a gag. "Extremes meet" is the kind of tidy saying that pretends the world is geometric: push far enough in opposite directions and you arrive at the same point. Hood punctures that complacency by attaching it to a whiting literally curled into a circle, tail in mouth. The image is comic, but it also exposes what the proverb is doing: turning contradiction into a pleasing loop, a closed system where tensions resolve themselves without anyone having to think too hard.
Hood's intent is less to refute the saying than to show its cheap magic trick. The whiting doesn't arrive at insight; it arrives at self-consumption. "Extremes meet" becomes less dialectical wisdom than a caricature of reasoning that chases itself until it bites down. The subtext is aimed at fashionable moralizing and political platitudes of Hood's era, when slogans and maxims could smooth over real material conflicts in industrial Britain. If everything circles back, then no one has to account for harm, power, or messy asymmetry.
Context matters: Hood wrote in a period when witty periodicals and light verse were vehicles for sharp social observation. His method is to let the proverb condemn itself by literalization. Once you picture the fish, the phrase can't stay lofty; it becomes bodily, absurd, faintly grim. The joke lands because it reveals the proverb's hidden wish: that opposites neatly reconcile. Hood's whiting suggests another possibility - that "meeting" can look like collapse, not synthesis.
Hood's intent is less to refute the saying than to show its cheap magic trick. The whiting doesn't arrive at insight; it arrives at self-consumption. "Extremes meet" becomes less dialectical wisdom than a caricature of reasoning that chases itself until it bites down. The subtext is aimed at fashionable moralizing and political platitudes of Hood's era, when slogans and maxims could smooth over real material conflicts in industrial Britain. If everything circles back, then no one has to account for harm, power, or messy asymmetry.
Context matters: Hood wrote in a period when witty periodicals and light verse were vehicles for sharp social observation. His method is to let the proverb condemn itself by literalization. Once you picture the fish, the phrase can't stay lofty; it becomes bodily, absurd, faintly grim. The joke lands because it reveals the proverb's hidden wish: that opposites neatly reconcile. Hood's whiting suggests another possibility - that "meeting" can look like collapse, not synthesis.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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