米德佳英文編修校對 & 中翻英的部落格

If you request something to be given you should not question what you are given. If someone gives you something you asked for, you should not complain about what you get.

This proverbial phrase has much in common with don’t look a gift horse in the mouth both in meaning and by virtue of having been first recorded in print by John Heywood. Both phrases were coined well before any form of organised state support for the poor and express the widely held mediaeval opinion that if you asked for and received a gift you should be grateful for it. The ‘gift horse’ proverb was recorded first, in Heywood’s 1546 version of A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the Englishe tongue.

‘Beggars should not be choosers’ didn’t appear until the 1562 version of‘Proverbs’.

The proverb is more commonly expressed these days as ‘beggars can’t be choosers’. This leads to an ambiguity in meaning between ‘beggars are unable to be choosers’ and ‘beggars ought not to be choosers’. Of course, the latter is the original meaning.