Alternative Assets and Strategic Allocation: Rethinking the Institutional Approach

CHAPTER 23

Time and Tide

In attempting to find the source of the expression “time and tide wait for no man,” to which I alluded in an earlier chapter, I was intrigued to discover that it is truly ancient—the first known reference to it, in an English still in transition from its Germanic roots, dates to 1225, but there is reason to believe that it is considerably older. And “tide” referred, not to the movement of the waves, but to time (the modern Dutch for “time” is tijd, which is pronounced like “tide”). However, its use here is not simply poetic alliteration, because “time” and “tide” carried slightly different connotations. The phrase originally meant something like “neither the passage of time nor the opportune moment wait for anyone.” ...