Why You Should Always Judge a Book By Its Cover

The saying goes: "Don't judge a book by its cover." First off, no one knows where this saying came from. It just appeared one day. And I ask the question, who would be foolish enough to actually believe such a piece-of-garbage sentence like that. So let's analyze it. It's an imperative sentence, which means it is telling me what to do. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm no fan of being told what to do. So that's one strike against it right there.

Last I checked, the cover is where you put the title of the book. So this sentence is telling me that I can't even so much as look at the title of the book to know if I should read it unless I've read it already? That doesn't make any sense. If you need to read a book on elephants, but you read a book on coffee mugs because you didn't judge the book by the cover, then you're pretty screwed. Not to mention retarded because most elephant books have a picture of an elephant on there. But I suppose if you didn't look at the cover, you wouldn't know that either.

And there are lots of other things on the cover like reviews, synopsi, author names and whatnot that all help me judge a book to see if it is right for me. I'd say in a given year, I read two books that I actually pick out myself. These aren't just randomly pulled off the shelf; these are carefully selected, well studied, highly endorsed books. I don't want to waste my time reading a book when I could be doing considerably less thinking by sitting and watching TV.

But before all the metaphor police start whining, "Scott, it's a symbol for how you shouldn't judge someone before you know what they are like." Let me clear this up for you: I hate symbolism. I take all symbols literally because I don't really believe there actually is symbolism. It is just a literary figment of the imagination. An enigma, a coincidence that occurs between two unlike things that doesn't use like or as. Judging books by their covers makes a lot of sense so why would I want to use a cliche that is completely wrong?

For this reason, I am eliminating this phrase from the English language. It is no longer a tolerated phrase to say in public. It will go on the same list as all the swear words. It will be censored using beeps and symbols, which, yes, is ironic. $(%'# !@$&* % *@^& #+ *@& #$%^*. You may think to yourself, "Self, I don't think he can do that." You'd be wrong, though, because someone at some point said, "The word f*** is a stupid word, and people aren't going to use it anymore." And if you say that word today, you get charged with disturbing the peace. So if that guy can do it, I can do it.

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