The Best-Laid Schemes

Sometime in the late eighteenth century, Robert Burns drove a plough through a field mouse’s nest. He could see that the mouse had worked hard to build the nest, and he had destroyed all that work in an instant. As an apology, he wrote the poem titled, “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest, With The Plough,” containing the following stanza:

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!”

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“Thy-lane,” by the way, means “alone,” so Burns is telling the mouse that she isn’t the only one to make plans that turn out to be a waste.

But the word I want to focus on is in the third line of the above stanza. Americans usually translate this as “The best-laid plans of mice and men,” while Burns used the word schemes. It turns out that American dialect has diverged from British usage of this word.

The Encarta dictionary observes that in the U.K. scheme means “a plan, policy, or program carried out by a government or business.” But in the U.S., it means “a secret and cunning plan, especially one designed to cause damage or harm.” To an American, the word brings to mind Saruman scheming to get the one ring, or Lex Luthor scheming to kill Superman.

I’ve noticed from reading newspapers in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that politicians in those countries may scheme to their hearts’ content. But politicians caught scheming in the United States are likely to be tossed by the voters in the next election if they are not indicted and convicted first.

If scheme and plan have the same benign meaning in British commonwealth countries, the Antiplanner’s goal is for Americans to associate scheme and plan with the same dark meaning. Government planners promise us joy, but they almost invariably bring us grief and pain instead.