This catchphrase was popular in my youth. It was first an advertisement for painless dentistry and later adapted as a motto said by a fictitious mascot named Alfred E. Newman of Mad, an American humor magazine.
Newman’s gap-toothed smile, freckles, red hair, protruding ears, and scrawny body had been the cover art of the magazine for many issues. Created by American artist Norman Mingo, the character was first used in 1954.
It resonated with the readers because worrying seemed to be a daily staple due to the many unsettling events like nuclear bomb, wars, and natural disasters.
Five decades later . . . I read in Believe it or Not, which is beside the crossword puzzle that I solve (daily grace I receive early in the morning), “Cornell Unversty recently conducted a research on worrying and found that 85% of the things we worry about will never happen.”
Over an extended period of time, subjects of the study were observed, asked about the things they feared. Then the research delved into which imagined misfortune actually came true. Hah, a whopping 85% didn’t! Worrying had been for naught.
The Bible has assured us, thousands of years before this catchphrase came to be, that worrying can be replaced with peace.
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| Worry not, indeed! |
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