Folklore: Common Sense

Genre: Folk saying, Irish

Adrian McGarrity, male, mid-40s
electrician, golfer
Irish-born, Irish-English speaking
Oct 6, 2001
Collected in an airplane somewhere over Galicia, Portugal

“Common sense isn’t so common.”

Adrian is an electrician from Belfast, Northern Ireland, whom I met on a turbulent plane ride enroute from Lisbon to London. He was on holiday in Lisbon to play a golf tournament. Adrian was often told that “Common sense isn’t so common.”

Adrian said, “When I was a boy [in the ’60s], my mother would tell me, ‘it’s only common sense to do it that way...’ especially when you thought you were being pretty clever. It was a way of keeping you in your place. If you were doing something really stupid in the house, my father would say, ’or God’s sakes, use your common sense!’ and my mother (Eleanor) would say, ‘common sense isn’t so common.’”

My own grannie, Jane Walsh Reilly, who was from Bantry Bay, Co. Cork (b.1893), would often say something similar to me, “You’ve no more sense than the man in the moon.” The first time I heard it was in the mid-50s, when I was six or seven. 

The Man in the Moon is annotated with many variations in Archer Taylor & Bartlett Jere White’s “American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1820-1880,” (Harvard, 1958) (p. 236), but my grannie’s version is more succinct.

UC Berkeley Folklore Collections

Kroeber Hall, Dr. Alan Dundes