Behold the Proverbs of a People

Proverbial Wisdom in Culture, Literature, and Politics

Wolfgang Mieder

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626743038
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Folklore y mitología

The thirteen chapters of this book comprise an intriguing and informative entry into the world of proverb scholarship, illustrating that proverbs have always been and continue to be wisdom's international currency. The first section of the book focuses on the field of paremiology (proverb studies) in general, the spread of Anglo-American proverbs in Europe, and the phenomenon of modern proverbs. The second section analyzes the use of proverbs in the world of politics, including a chapter on President Obama, while the third concentrates on the uses of proverbs in literature. The final section ends with detailed cultural studies of the origin, history, dissemination, use, function, and meaning of specific proverbs.Noted scholar Wolfgang Mieder shows that proverbs matter in culture, literature, and politics. Proverbs remain part and parcel of oral and written communication, and, he demonstrates, they deserve to be studied from a range of viewpoints. While various chapters deal with a variety of issues and approaches, they cohere through a rhetorical perspective that looks at the text, texture, and context of proverbs as speech acts that make a noteworthy impact on culture and society. Whether proverbs appear in everyday speech, on the radio, on television, in films, on the pages of newspapers or magazines, in advertisements, in literary works, or in political speeches, they serve as formulaic verbal devices to add authoritative weight through tradition, convention, and wisdom.

1. “THE WIT OF ONE, AND THE WISDOM OF MANY”

Proverbs as Cultural Signs of Folklore

Of the various verbal folklore genres like fairy tales, legends, tall tales, jokes, and riddles, proverbs are the most concise but not necessarily the simplest form. The vast scholarship on proverbs is ample proof that they are anything but mundane matters in human communication (Mieder 1982–2001; Mieder 1999). Proverbs fulfill the human need to summarize experiences and observations into nuggets of wisdom that provide ready-made comments on personal relationships and social affairs. There are proverbs for every imaginable context, and they are thus as contradictory as life itself. Proverb pairs like “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” and “Out of sight, out of mind” or “Look before you leap” and “He who hesitates is lost” make it abundantly clear that proverbs do not represent a logical philosophical system. But when the proper proverb is chosen for a particular situation, it is bound to fit perfectly, becoming an effective formulaic strategy of communication. Contrary to some isolated opinions, proverbs have not lost their usefulness in modern society. They serve people well in oral speech and the written word, coming to mind almost automatically as prefabricated verbal units. While the frequency of their employment might well vary among people and contexts, proverbs are a significant rhetorical force in various modes of communication, from friendly chats, powerful political speeches, and religious sermons to lyrical poetry, best-selling novels, and the influential mass media. Proverbs are in fact everywhere, and this ubiquity has led scholars from many disciplines to study them from classical times to the modern age (Mieder 1997a). The playful alteration of the proverb “If the shoe fits, wear it” to “If the proverb fits, use it” says it all!

Definition and Meaning

The definition of a proverb has caused scholars from many disciplines much chagrin over the centuries. Many attempts have been made from Aristotle to the present time (Kindstrand 1978; Russo 1983), ranging from philosophical considerations to cut-and-dry lexicographical definitions. The American paremiologist Bartlett Jere Whiting (1904–1995) reviewed many definitions, summarizing his findings in a lengthy conglomerate version of his own:

A proverb is an expression which, owing its birth to the people, testifies to its origin in form and phrase. It expresses what is apparently a fundamental truth—that is, a truism,—in homely language, often adorned, however, with alliteration and rhyme. It is usually short, but need not be; it is usually true, but need not be. Some proverbs have both a literal and figurative meaning, either of which makes perfect sense; but more often they have but one of the two. A proverb must be venerable; it must bear the sign of antiquity, and, since such signs may be counterfeited by a clever literary man, it should be attested in different places at different times. This last requirement we must often waive in dealing with very early literature, where the material at our disposal is incomplete. (Whiting 1932: 302; also in Whiting 1994: 80)

That certainly is a useful summation, albeit not a very precise statement. It represents a reaction to a tongue-in-cheek statement that Whiting’s friend Archer Taylor (1890–1973) had made a year earlier at the beginning of his classic study on The Proverb (1931; see also Taylor 1975):

The definition of a proverb is too difficult to repay the undertaking; and should we fortunately combine in a single definition all the essential elements and give each the proper emphasis, we should not even then have a touchstone. An incommunicable quality tells us this sentence is proverbial and that one is not. Hence no definition will enable us to identify positively a sentence as proverbial. Those who do not speak a language can never recognize all its proverbs, and similarly much that is truly proverbial escapes us in Elizabethan and older English. Let us be content with recognizing that a proverb is a saying current among the folk. At least so much of a definition is indisputable. (Taylor 1931: 3)

In 1985 I put to the test Taylor’s supposition that people in general know what a proverb is, and simply asked a cross section of fifty-five Vermont citizens how they would define a proverb. After all, the general folk uses proverbs all the time, and one would think that they know intuitively what a proverb represents. A frequency study of the words contained in the definition attempts made it possible to formulate the following general description: “A proverb is a short, generally known sentence of the folk which contains wisdom, truth, morals, and traditional views in a metaphorical, fixed and memorizable form and which is handed down from generation to generation” (Mieder 1985b: 119; also in Mieder 1993: 24). This summary definition mirrors that of Whiting, while the short conglomerate version “A proverb is a short sentence of wisdom” based on the words most often used in the fifty-odd definitions resembles Taylor’s statement. People in general, not bothered by academic concerns and intricacies, thus have a good idea of what a proverb encompasses. This is also borne out by a number of proverbs about proverbs, representing folk definitions as it were: “Proverbs are the children of experience,” “Proverbs are the wisdom of the streets,” and “Proverbs are true words.” Proverbs obviously contain a lot of common sense, experience, wisdom, and truth, and as such they represent ready-made traditional strategies in oral speech acts and writings from high literature to the mass media (Hasan-Rokem 1990).

But proverb scholars have, of course, not been satisfied with the vagaries of this type of definition. Again and again they have tried to approximate the definition (Arora 1984). Suffice it to cite two more general work-definitions, starting with Stuart A. Gallacher’s short statement: “A proverb is a concise statement of an apparent truth which has [had, or will have] currency among the people” (1959: 47). The parenthetical modifications have been added by me to indicate that while some proverbs have been in use for hundreds of years, others have passed out of circulation and new ones will certainly be coined. One of my own attempts of defining proverbs precisely shows my indebtedness to my teacher Stuart A. Gallacher: “Proverbs [are] concise traditional statements of apparent truths with currency among the folk. More elaborately stated, proverbs are short, generally known sentences of the folk that contain wisdom, truths, morals, and traditional views in a metaphorical, fixed, and memorizable form and that are handed down from generation to generation” (Mieder 1996b: 597).

One of the major concerns of paremiologists is to get to the bottom of that “incommunicable quality” of proverbiality. It is a fact that not even the most complex definition will be able to identify all proverbs. The crux of the matter lies in the concept of traditionality that includes aspects of both age and currency. In other words, a particular sentence might sound like a proverb—for example, “Where there is money, there is crime”—and yet not be one. This invented sentence is based on the common proverb pattern “Where there is X, there is Y” (Peukes 1977), and it appears to contain some perceived generalizations about wealth and legal matters. But that does not attest to its alleged proverbiality. This piece of created wisdom would have to be taken over by others and be used over a period of time to be considered a bona fide proverb. As it stands here on this page, it is nothing more than a “proverb-like” statement. Proverb definitions often include the term “traditional,” but proving that a given text has gained traditionality is quite another matter. This makes it very difficult to decide what new statements have in fact gained proverbial status. Such modern American texts as “Been there, done that,” “The camera doesn’t lie,” “No guts, no glory,” and “There is no (such thing as a) free lunch” have made it (Doyle 1996). Why is this so? Simply stated, they have been registered numerous times over the years. The last example also shows the formation of variants. And it is exactly the requirement of all folklore, including proverbs, that various references and possibly also variants are found that attest to oral currency.

Stephen D. Winick has tried valiantly to break with the requirement of traditionality for new proverbs, arguing that a text becomes a proverb upon its creation (see also Honeck and Welge 1997). That would make the sentence “Where there is money, there is crime” a proverb! Most folklorists and paremiologists would disagree with this assessment. The fact that the sentence is “proverb-like” does not make it a folk proverb, putting in question Winick’s convoluted definition:

Proverbs are brief (sentence-length) entextualized utterances which derive a sense of wisdom, wit and authority from explicit and intentional intertextual reference to a tradition of previous similar wisdom utterances. This intertextual reference may take many forms, including replication (i.e., repetition of the text from previous contexts), imitation (i.e., modeling a new utterance after a previous utterance), or use of features (rhyme, alliteration, meter, ascription to the elders, etc.) associated with previous wisdom sayings. Finally, proverbs address recurrent social situations in a strategic way. (Winick 2003: 595)

The preference for metaphorical proverbs lies in the fact that they can be employed in a figurative or indirect way. Verbal folklore in general is based on indirection, and much can indeed be said or implied by the opportune use of such proverbs as “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” “Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched,” “Every cloud has a silver lining,” or “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” By associating an actual situation with a metaphorical proverb, the particular matter is generalized into a common occurrence of life. Instead of scolding someone directly for not behaving according to the cultural customs of a different social or cultural setting, one might indirectly comment that “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Or if someone must be warned to be more careful with health issues, the proverb “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” might well serve the purpose to add some commonly accepted wisdom to the argument. Kenneth Burke has provided the following explanation of this effective use of metaphorical proverbs: “Proverbs are strategies for dealing with situations. In so far as situations are typical and recurrent in a given social structure, people develop names for them and strategies for handling them. Another name for strategies might be attitudes” (1941: 256). Proverbs in actual use refer to social situations, and this social context in turn gives them meaning (Seitel 1969). They act as signs for human behavior and social contexts and as such must be studied both from the structural and semiotic point of view (Kuusi 1957a; Grzybek 1987; Zholkovskii 1978).

The meaning of proverbs is thus very much dependent on the contexts in which they appear. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has shown how a number of common proverbs have multiple meanings that come to light only in particular situations. For example, she asked about eighty students in Texas to explain the meaning of the proverb “A friend in need is a friend indeed.” Here are the different explanations with comments on the various sources of the multiple meanings:

(1) Someone who feels close enough to you to be able to ask you for help when he is in need is really your friend—Syntactic ambiguity (is your friend in need or are you in need?).

(2) Someone who helps you when you are in need is really your friend—Lexical ambiguity (indeed or in deed).

(3) Someone who helps you by means of his actions (deeds) when you need him is a real friend as opposed to someone who just makes promises—Key meaning.

(4) Someone who is only your friend when he needs you is not a true friend—Does “a friend indeed” mean “a true friend” or “not a true friend”?

(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1973: 822; also in Mieder and Dundes 1981: 113–14)

Clearly only a specific context will reveal what the proverb really wants to say. The Estonian paremiologist Arvo Krikmann has spoken in this regard of the “semantic indefiniteness” of proverbs that results from their hetero-situativity, poly-functionality, and poly-semanticity (Krikmann 1974a, 1974b). The meaning of any proverb must therefore be analyzed in its distinctive context, be it social, literary, rhetorical, journalistic, or whatever.

Genesis and Evolution

Proverbs, like riddles, jokes or fairy tales, do not fall out of the sky and neither are they products of a mythical soul of the folk. Instead they are always coined by an individual either intentionally or unintentionally, as expressed in Lord John Russell’s well-known one-line proverb definition that has taken on a proverbial status of sorts: “A proverb is the wit of one, and the wisdom of many” (1823). If the statement contains an element of truth or wisdom, and if it exhibits one or more proverbial markers (such as alliteration, rhyme, parallelism, ellipsis, etc.), it might “catch on” and be used first in a small family circle, and subsequently in a village, a city, a region, a country, a continent, and eventually the world. The global spread of proverbs is not a pipe dream, since certain ancient proverbs have spread to many parts of the world. Today, with the incredible power of the mass media, a newly formulated proverb-like statement might become a bona fide proverb relatively quickly by way of the internet, radio, television, and print media. As with verbal folklore in general, the original statement might well be varied a bit as it gets picked up and becomes ever more an anonymous proverb whose wording, structure, style, and metaphor are such that it is memorable. Older literary sources show very clearly that proverbs existed in such variants until one dominant wording eventually became the standard, to wit the following three historical variants of a proverb of prudence: “It is good to be wise before the mischief” (1584), “After the business is over, every one is wise” (1666), and “It is easy to be wise after the event” (1900), with the latter version having become today’s standard form (Wilson, 1970: 898).

It is usually quite difficult to trace the origin and history of a proverb in a particular language. Such studies quickly take on major proportions, and they get very involved if the proverb under investigation proves to go back to medieval times or even further to classical antiquity. Any bilingual speaker or translator will have noticed that there exist two types of proverbs. On the one hand, there are those that mean the same but that have different structures, vocabulary, and metaphors, and consequently have different origins in their respective languages. Thus, English speakers since Shakespeare say “Brevity is the soul of wit” while Germans utter “In der Kürze liegt die Würze” (In brevity there is [lies] spice). Whoever needs to translate one of these texts would have to know the quite different equivalent in the target language or find it in a dictionary. Regional proverbs become especially difficult translation problems, since possible equivalents are often missing from dictionaries, which tend to include only the more common proverbs. On the other hand, many proverbs are identical not only in German and ...