English Proverbs – A Bad Workman Blames His Tools

Hey guys, it’s Shane from English Understood here and this is part one of the English proverb series.

What’s a proverb? What’s the difference between a proverb and an idiom? Well, an idiom is a phrase or a sentence that has a different meaning from the individual words by themselves.

But a proverb is a sentence or a phrase which is normally known by many people and it’s used to teach or to give knowledge.

So the proverb for today is ‘A bad workman blames his tools.’ What do you think this means?

This means that if someone does a job very poorly, they will blame everything else but themselves. So for example, they will blame the weather. They will blame the person that helped them. They will blame the equipment that they were using.

But they won’t take responsibility for their actions. They won’t blame themselves, they will blame other things.

So the lesson that this proverb tries to teach is that if you do something badly, don’t blame anything else. Take responsibility for your actions.

For example, if the tools weren’t very good, you should have got some different tools. Or if the weather was bad, you should have done the job on a different day.

So what do you think about this proverb? Do you think it’s right? Do you think it’s wrong? Why? Comment down below and let me know.