When I was 10 or 12 or so, my father said to me, “Empty barrels make the most noise.” I got the meaning from the context – we’d just listened to an egotist engage in bombast (although I didn’t know those words yet) – but that doesn’t mean I understood the phrase.

How could an empty barrel make noise?

I don’t think I asked. Either too much was going on then or more likely I was embarrassed by my ignorance and kept trying to make sense of it on my own. And finally:

Oh! The barrel has to be moving for the saying to be so. Sure. If you roll a barrel down a hilly street, it will make more noise if it’s empty than if it’s full.

But I’m still arguing, because I think it would make the most noise if it were partially full.

Half-empty barrels make the most noise? That is truer: an empty barrel is an imbecile but a half-empty container is ignorant.

Maybe an adage doesn’t work as well as this:

Recently I heard a very bright man, a software engineer, state that while he knew his work was good, he was smart enough to recognize that the work of some others was better. Long ago I heard a very bright young woman state that she was intelligent enough to grasp how much more intelligent she might have been.

In other words, kids, people who are truly brilliant and thoughtful are always humble. Beware of bombast, except for pure entertainment.