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Reader question: Please explain “keep his counsel”, as in: He should learn to keep his counsel. My comments: He should learn to keep his opinion to himself. Perhaps he talked too much. Keeping one’s counsel is a British idiom, the full term being “keep one’s own counsel”. Counsel is a formal word for advice. We seek other people’s counsel when we’re in serious trouble, for instance. That means we seek their advice on how to solve our problems. To keep one’s own counsel is therefore to keep our good advice to ourselves, to keep our opinion and thoughts private and unknown, i.e. not to confide in others. The thing to remember about this phrase is the word “counsel”. As I said, counsel is a big word, very formal. Hence do not take it lightly. You should use this phrase on people who have a lot of good things to say but choose not to say it. Don’t, that is, use it on people who have nothing to say in the first place. In our example, further explanation is not given as to why “he” should learn to keep his counsel, but we can pretty much safely infer that he talked too much and perhaps landed himself or other people in trouble. That’s why the speaker thinks he should learn a lesson and, hopefully, hold his tongue in future. As a general policy, I think it is a good idea for one (one and all, that is, i.e. all of us) to learn to keep our own counsel sometimes. Off the top of my head I can list a hundred reasons (by an incomplete count) why we should. | 
