Text

“My dad always says, ‘don’t borrow trouble.’ Like if I’m worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet, or spiraling about a hypothetical, he’ll just go ‘don’t borrow trouble’ and that’s it. That’s the whole conversation. He grew up in the South and I think it’s a Southern thing. I catch myself saying it to my friends now too, which is annoying because I used to hate when he’d say it to me.”

Context

My informant’s father is from Georgia and uses this phrase constantly. She’s noticed she’s started using it herself in adulthood, even though it irritated her growing up.

Analysis

“Don’t borrow trouble” is a classic piece of American folk speech, usually associated with the South. It’s a great example of how proverbs do a lot of cultural work in just a few words. The phrase compresses a whole concept into three syllables: don’t anticipate problems that haven’t arrived, don’t spend present energy on hypothetical future suffering. The word “borrow” is what makes the saying catchy enough to land. It treats trouble like something you could go out and take on loan, building up worry like a debt before anything bad has actually happened. That’s a very practical, no-nonsense way of thinking about worry and fits the down-to-earth style of a lot of Southern sayings.