I’m nerdy for a lot of reasons, but one of the nerdier things I like to do is look up origins of common phrases. Today I decided to look up “The Best Laid Plans.” Sometimes people say that when things go wrong, “Well, you know, the best laid plans …”

So, it turns out that is from a poem. This may not be a surprise to some of the smarter set. Me? I thought it was from John Steinbeck. The poet is Robert Burns and the poem is To A Mouse. So I read the poem and I didn’t like it. At first. It didn’t flow, it was awkward and the words were stumbly, but after I picked up the meaning, I liked it. It’s about this old Scottish farmer who ploughs through a mouse’s house and take some time to commiserate with houseless mouse. The quote comes from the second-to-last stanza that goes:

But little Mousie, thou are not alone
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go oft awry
And leave us nought but grief and pain
For promis’d joy!

If you followed the link to the poem’s Wikipedia page, you’ll notice that my little quote here varies slightly from the Standard English Translation because I didn’t like the Wikipedia version and I think my version is a little less crappier.

The poem as originally written is almost impossible to understand so a translation is necessary, but the “Standard English translation” sounds like someone ran the original through Google Translate. If you read the original with an awesome Mike Myers Scottish accent, you can guess at a lot of the words, plus the poem flows better. Which is to say, at all.