A Fly in the Ointment

Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly in him that is in reputation for wisdom and honour.

-- Ecclesiastes 10: 1 (KJV)

I don't know about ointment, but I do know that one little fly can really spoil a good potato salad. Ecclesiastes' vivid phrasing -- the fly causes not just a "bad smell" but a "stinking savour" -- emphasizes how catastrophically, and how quickly, a relatively minor flaw may ruin the best of things. (In English, Ecclesiastes speaks of "dead flies"; we've dropped "dead" from our usage, which is no great loss, because in the Hebrew the phrase is closer to "deadly flies.") And the better something is, the smaller need be the flaw to spoil it.

Here, the author speaks of how damaging one miscue may be to the person of high repute. Today, "a fly in the ointment" generally refers to less consequential disappointments -- the one sour note, the one bad joke. P. G. Wodehouse proposed this nice equation: "one flaw, one fly in the ointment, one individual caterpillar in the salad" (The Indiscretions of Archie, 1921).

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!