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A proverb (from ) or an adage is a simple, traditional saying that expresses a perceived truth based on common sense or experience. Proverbs are often metaphorical and are an example of formulaic speech. A proverbial phrase or a proverbial expression is a type of a conventional saying similar to proverbs and transmitted by oral tradition. The difference is that a proverb is a fixed expression, while a proverbial phrase permits alterations to fit the grammar of the context.Arvo Krikmann "the Great Chain Metaphor: An Open Sezame for Proverb Semantics?", , 11 (1994), pp. 117–124. Collectively, they form a folklore genre.
Some proverbs exist in more than one language because people borrow them from languages and cultures with which they are in contact. In the West, the Bible (including, but not limited to the Book of Proverbs) and medieval Latin (aided by the work of Erasmus) have played a considerable role in distributing proverbs. Not all Biblical proverbs, however, were distributed to the same extent: one scholar has gathered evidence to show that cultures in which the Bible is the major spiritual book contain "between three hundred and five hundred proverbs that stem from the Bible,"p. 12, Wolfgang Mieder. 1990. Not by bread alone: Proverbs of the Bible. New England Press. whereas another shows that, of the 106 most common and widespread proverbs across Europe, 11 are from the Bible.Paczolay, Gyula. 1997. European Proverbs in 55 Languages. Veszpre'm, Hungary. However, almost every culture has its own unique proverbs.
More constructively, Wolfgang Mieder has proposed the following definition, "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".p. 5. Wolfgang Mieder. 1993. "The wit of one, and the wisdom of many: General thoughts on the nature of the proverb. Proverbs are never out of season: Popular wisdom in the modern age 3–40. Oxford University Press. To distinguish proverbs from idioms, cliches, etc., Norrick created a table of distinctive features, an abstract tool originally developed for linguistics.p. 73. Neil Norrick. 1985. How Proverbs Mean: Semantic Studies in English Proverbs. Amsterdam: Mouton. Prahlad distinguishes proverbs from some other, closely related types of sayings, "True proverbs must further be distinguished from other types of proverbial speech, e.g. proverbial phrases, , maxims, quotations, and proverbial comparisons."p. 33. Sw. Anand Prahlad. 1996. African-American Proverbs in Context. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Based on Persian proverbs, Zolfaghari and Ameri propose the following definition: "A proverb is a short sentence, which is well-known and at times rhythmic, including advice, sage themes and ethnic experiences, comprising simile, metaphor or irony which is well-known among people for its fluent wording, clarity of expression, simplicity, expansiveness and generality and is used either with or without change."p. 107, Hassan Zolfaghari & Hayat Ameri. "Persian Proverbs: Definitions and Characteristics". Journal of Islamic and Human Advanced Research 2(2012) 93–108.
There are many sayings in English that are commonly referred to as "proverbs", such as weather sayings. Alan Dundes, however, rejects including such sayings among truly proverbs: "Are weather proverbs proverbs? I would say emphatically 'No!'"p. 45. Alan Dundes. 1984. On whether weather 'proverbs' are proverbs. Proverbium 1:39–46. Also, 1989, in Folklore Matters edited by Alan Dundes, 92–97. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. The definition of "proverb" has also changed over the years. For example, the following was labeled "A Yorkshire proverb" in 1883, but would not be categorized as a proverb by most today, "as throng as Throp's wife when she hanged herself with a dish-cloth".A Yorkshire proverb. 1883. The Academy. July 14, no. 584. p.30. The changing of the definition of "proverb" is also noted in Turkish language.Ezgi Ulusoy Aranyosi. 2010. "Atasözü neydi, ne oldu?" "What. Millî Folklor: International and Quarterly Journal of Cultural Studies 11.88: 5–15.
In other languages and cultures, the definition of "proverb" also differs from English. In the Chumburung language of Ghana, " aŋase are literal proverbs and akpare are metaphoric ones".p. 64. Gillian Hansford. 2003. Understanding Chumburung proverbs. Journal of West African Languages 30.1:57–82. Among the Edo language of Nigeria, there are three words that are used to translate "proverb": ere, ivbe, and itan. The first relates to historical events, the second relates to current events, and the third was "linguistic ornamentation in formal discourse".p. 4,5. Daniel Ben-Amos. Introduction: Folklore in African Society. Forms of Folklore in Africa, edited by Bernth Lindfors, pp. 1–36. Austin: University of Texas. Among the Balochi language of Pakistan and Afghanistan, there is a word batal for ordinary proverbs and bassīttuks for "proverbs with background stories".p. 43. Sabir Badalkhan. 2000. "Ropes break at the weakest point": Some examples of Balochi proverbs with background stories. Proverbium 17:43–69.
There are also language communities that combine proverbs and riddles in some sayings, leading some scholars to create the label "proverb riddles".John C. Messenger, Jr. Anang Proverb-Riddles. The Journal of American Folklore Vol. 73, No. 289 (July–September 1960), pp. 225–235.p. 418. Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Literature in Africa. The Saylor Foundation, 1982.Umoh, S. J. 2007. The Ibibio ProverbRiddles and Language Pedagogy. International Journal of Linguistics and Communication 11(2), 8–13.
Another similar construction is an phrase. Sometimes it is difficult to draw a distinction between idiomatic phrase and proverbial expression. In both of them the meaning does not immediately follow from the phrase. The difference is that an idiomatic phrase involves figurative language in its components, while in a proverbial phrase the figurative meaning is the extension of its literal meaning. Some experts classify proverbs and proverbial phrases as types of idioms.Lexicography: Critical Concepts (2003) R. R. K. Hartmann, Mick R K Smith, , p. 303
Some authors have created proverbs in their writings, such as J.R.R. Tolkien, and some of these proverbs have made their way into broader society. Similarly, C. S. Lewis is credited for a proverb regarding a lobster in a pot, which he wrote about in his book series Chronicles of Narnia.Peter Unseth. 2014. A created proverb in a novel becomes broadly used in society: "‛Easily in but not easily out', as the lobster said in his lobster pot." Crossroads: A Journal of English Studies online access In cases like this, deliberately created proverbs for fictional societies have become proverbs in real societies. In a fictional story set in a real society, the movie Forrest Gump introduced "Life is like a box of chocolates" into broad society.p. 70, Winick, Stephen. 1998. The Proverb Process: Intertextuality and Proverbial Innovation in Popular Culture. University of Pennsylvania: PhD dissertation. In at least one case, it appears that a proverb deliberately created by one writer has been naively picked up and used by another who assumed it to be an established Chinese proverb, Ford Madox Ford having picked up a proverb from Ernest Bramah, "It would be hypocrisy to seek for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a Low Tea House."Hawthorn, Jeremy, ‘Ernest Bramah: Source of Ford Madox Ford’s Chinese Proverb?’ Notes and Queries, 63.2 (2016), 286–288.
The proverb with "a longer history than any other recorded proverb in the world", going back to "around 1800 BC"p. 5. Alster, Bendt. 1979. An Akkadian and a Greek proverb. A comparative study. Die Welt des Orients 10. 1–5. is in a Sumerian clay tablet, "The bitch by her acting too hastily brought forth the blind".p. 17. Moran, William L. 1978a. An Assyriological gloss on the new Archilochus fragment. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 82. 17–19.Unseth, Peter. "The World’s Oldest Living Proverb Discovered Thriving in Ethiopia." Aethiopica 21 (2018): 226–236. Though many proverbs are ancient, they were all newly created at some point by somebody. Sometimes it is easy to detect that a proverb is newly coined by a reference to something recent, such as the Haitian proverb "The fish that is being microwaved doesn't fear the lightning".p. 325, Linda Tavernier-Almada. 1999. Prejudice, power, and poverty in Haiti: A study of a nation's culture as seen through its proverbs. Proverbium 16:325–350. Similarly, there is a recent Maltese language proverb, wil-muturi, ferh u duluri "Women and motorcycles are joys and griefs"; the proverb is clearly new, but still formed as a traditional style couplet with rhyme.p. 125. Aquilina, Joseph. 1972. A Comparative Dictionary of Maltese Proverbs. Malta: Royal University of Malta. Also, there is a proverb in the Kafa language of Ethiopia that refers to the forced military conscription of the 1980s, "...the one who hid himself lived to have children."Mesfin Wodajo. 2012. Functions and Formal and Stylistic Features of Kafa Proverbs. LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. A Mongolian proverb also shows evidence of recent origin, "A beggar who sits on gold; Foam rubber piled on edge."p. 22, Janice Raymond. Mongolian Proverbs: A window into their world. San Diego: Alethinos Books. Another example of a proverb that is clearly recent is this from Sesotho: "A mistake goes with the printer."Rethabile M Possa-Mogoera. The Dynamism of Culture: The Case of Sesotho Proverbs." Southern African Journal for Folklore Studies Vol. 20 (2) October. A political candidate in Kenya popularised a new proverb in his 1995 campaign, Chuth ber "Immediacy is best". "The proverb has since been used in other contexts to prompt quick action."p. 68. Okumba Miruka. 2001. Oral Literature of the Luo. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. Over 1,400 new English proverbs are said to have been coined and gained currency in the 20th century.Charles Clay Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder, Fred R. Shapiro. 2012. The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs. Yale University Press.
This process of creating proverbs is always ongoing, so that possible new proverbs are being created constantly. Those sayings that are adopted and used by an adequate number of people become proverbs in that society.p. 5. Wolfgang Mieder. 1993. Proverbs are never out of season. New York: Oxford University Press.Mieder, Wolfgang. 2017. Futuristic Paremiography and Paremiology: A Plea for the Collection and Study of Modern Proverbs. Poslovitsy v frazeologicheskom pole: Kognitivnyi, diskursivnyi, spoostavitel’nyi aspekty. Ed. T.N. Fedulenkova. Vladimir: Vladimirskii Gosudarstvennyie Universitet, 2017. 205–226.
The creation of proverbs in many parts of the world during the Corona-virus era showed how quickly proverbs and anti-proverbs can be created.Haas, Heather A. "The Proverbs of a Pandemic: The Early Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic Viewed through the Lens of Google Trends." Journal of American Folklore 135, no. 535 (2022): 26-48.Mawere, Munyaradze. "Epistemological and Moral Aspects of Selected Shona Proverbial Lore: Implications for Health and Safety in the Face of Covid-19 and Other Such Pandemics." Being and Becoming African as a Permanent Work in Progress: Inspiration from Chinua Achebe’s Proverbs (2021): 363-377.Raji-Oyelade, Aderemi. "COVID-19 (Post) Proverbials: Twisting the Word Against the Virus." Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship 39, no. 1 (2022): 224-244.
Similarly, among Tajik language speakers, the proverb "One hand cannot clap" has two significantly different interpretations. Most see the proverb as promoting teamwork. Others understand it to mean that an argument requires two people.p. 158. Evan Bell. 2009. An analysis of Tajik proverbs. Masters thesis, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics. In an extreme example, one researcher working in Ghana found that for a single Akan proverb, twelve different interpretations were given.Sjaak van der Geest. 1996. The Elder and His Elbow: Twelve Interpretations of an Akan Proverb. Research in African Literatures Vol. 27, No. 3: 110–118. Proverb interpretation is not automatic, even for people within a culture: Owomoyela tells of a Yoruba radio program that asked people to interpret an unfamiliar Yoruba proverb, "very few people could do so".Owomoyela, Oyekan. 1988. A Kì í : Yorùbá proscriptive and prescriptive proverbs. Lanham, MD : University Press of America. Siran found that people who had moved out of the traditional Vute-speaking area of Cameroon were not able to interpret Vute proverbs correctly, even though they still spoke Vute. Their interpretations tended to be literal.pp. 236–237. Siran, Jean-Louis. 1993. Rhetoric, tradition, and communication: The dialectics of meaning in proverb use. Man n.s. 28.2:225–242.
Children will sometimes interpret proverbs in a literal sense, not yet knowing how to understand the conventionalized metaphor. Interpretation of proverbs is also affected by injuries and diseases of the brain, "A hallmark of schizophrenia is impaired proverb interpretation."Michael Kiang, et al, Cognitive, neurophysiological, and functional correlates of proverb interpretation abnormalities in schizophrenia. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society (2007), 13, 653–663. Futuristic
However, people will often quote only a fraction of a proverb to invoke an entire proverb, e.g. "All is fair" instead of "All is fair in love and war", and "A rolling stone" for "A rolling stone gathers no moss."
The grammar of proverbs is not always the typical grammar of the spoken language. Elements are often moved around, to achieve rhyme or focus.Sebastian J. Floor. 2005. Poetic Fronting in a Wisdom Poetry Text: The Information Structure of Proverbs 7. Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 31: 23–58.
Another type of grammatical construction is the wellerism, a speaker and a quotation, often with an unusual circumstance, such as the following, a representative of a wellerism proverb found in many languages: "The bride couldn't dance; she said, 'The room floor isn't flat.'"p. 20, 21. Unseth, Peter, Daniel Kliemt, Laurel Morgan, Stephen Nelson, Elaine Marie Scherrer. 2017. Wellerism proverbs: Mapping their distribution. GIALens 11.3: website
Another type of grammatical structure in proverbs is a short dialogue:
In addition, proverbs may still be used in languages which were once more widely known in a society, but are now no longer so widely known. For example, English speakers use some non-English proverbs that are drawn from languages that used to be widely understood by the educated class, e.g. "C'est la vie" from French and "Carpe diem" from Latin.
Proverbs are often handed down through generations. Therefore, "many proverbs refer to old measurements, obscure professions, outdated weapons, unknown plants, animals, names, and various other traditional matters."p. 33. Wolfgang Mieder. 2014. Behold the Proverbs of a People: Proverbial Wisdom in Culture, Literature, and Politics. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Therefore, it is common that they preserve words that become less common and archaic in broader society.Issa O. Sanusi and R.K. Omoloso. The role of Yoruba proverbs in preserving archaic lexical items and expressions in Yoruba. [4]Eme, Cecilia A., Davidson U. Mbagwu, and Benjamin I. Mmadike. "Igbo proverbs and loss of metaphors." PREORC Journal of Arts and Humanities 1.1 (2016): 72–91. Archaic proverbs in solid formsuch as murals, carvings, and glasscan be viewed even after the language of their form is no longer widely understood, such as an Anglo-French proverb in a stained glass window in York.Lisa Reilly & Mary B. Shepard (2016) "Sufferance fait ease en temps": word as image at St Michael-le-Belfrey, York. Word & Image 32:2, 218–234. .
Proverbs about one hand clapping are common across Asia,Kamil V. Zvelebil. 1987. The Sound of the One Hand. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 107, No. 1, pp. 125–126. from Dari in Afghanistanp. 16, Edward Zellem. 2012. Zarbul Masalha: 151 Aghan Dari proverbs. to Japan.p. 164. Philip B. Yampolsky, (trans.). 1977. The Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings. New York, Columbia University Press. Some studies have been done devoted to the spread of proverbs in certain regions, such as India and her neighborsLudwik Sternbach. 1981. Indian Wisdom and Its Spread beyond India. Journal of the American Oriental Society Vol. 101, No. 1, pp. 97–131. and Europe.Matti Kuusi; Marje Joalaid; Elsa Kokare; Arvo Krikmann; Kari Laukkanen; Pentti Leino; Vaina Mālk; Ingrid Sarv. Proverbia Septentrionalia. 900 Balto-Finnic Proverb Types with Russian, Baltic, German and Scandinavian Parallels. Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia (1985) An extreme example of the borrowing and spread of proverbs was the work done to create a corpus of proverbs for Esperanto, where all the proverbs were translated from other languages.Fiedler, Sabine. 1999. Phraseology in planned languages. Language problems and language planning 23.2: 175–187.
It is often not possible to trace the direction of borrowing a proverb between languages. This is complicated by the fact that the borrowing may have been through plural languages. In some cases, it is possible to make a strong case for discerning the direction of the borrowing based on an artistic form of the proverb in one language, but a prosaic form in another language. For example, in Ethiopia there is a proverb "Of mothers and water, there is none evil." It is found in Amharic, Alaaba language, and Oromo language, three languages of Ethiopia:
However, not all languages have proverbs. Proverbs are (nearly) universal across Europe, Asia, and Africa. Some languages in the Pacific have them, such as Māori with whakataukī.Brougham, Aileen E., Alexander Wyclif Reed, and Tīmoti Sam Kāretu. The Reed book of Maori proverbs. Reed Books, 1999. Other Pacific languages do not, e.g. "there are no proverbs in Kilivila" of the Trobriand Islands.p. 277. Senft, Gunter. 2010. The Trobriand Islanders' Ways of Speaking. (Volume 27 of Trends in Linguistics. Documentation.) Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. In the New World, there are almost no proverbs: "While proverbs abound in the thousands in most cultures of the world, it remains a riddle why the Native Americans have hardly any proverb tradition at all."p. 108. Mieder, Wolfgang. 2004. Proverbs: A handbook. Greenwood Publishing Group. Although, "as Mieder has commented . . . the reason for the visible lack of proverbs was probably the inability of foreign researchers to identify proverbial utterances among those peoples."p. 313. Hakamies, Pekka. 2016. "Proverbs – A Universal Genre?", in Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Folklore and Beyond, ed. by Kaarina Koski and Frog with Ulla Savolainen, Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Hakamies has examined the matter of whether proverbs are found universally, a universal genre, concluding that they are not.Hakamies, Pekka. 2016. "Proverbs – A Universal Genre?", in Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Folklore and Beyond, ed. by Kaarina Koski and Frog with Ulla Savolainen, pp. 299–316. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.
Probably the most famous user of proverbs in novels is J. R. R. Tolkien in his The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series.Michael Stanton. 1996. Advice is a dangerous gift. Proverbium 13: 331–345Trokhimenko, Olga. 2003. "If You Sit on the Doorstep Long Enough, You Will Think of Something": The Function of Proverbs in J. R. R. Tolkien's Hobbit." Proverbium (journal)20: 367–378.Rowe, David. 2016. The proverbs of Middle-Earth, 2nd edition. Herman Melville is noted for creating proverbs in Moby-DickHayes, Kevin. Melville’s Folk Roots. Kent State University Press, 1999, p. 30. and in his poetry.Unseth, Peter. 2015. The Source of Melville’s Iroquois Proverb. ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 28:3–4, 182–185.p. 141. Renker, Elizabeth. 2014. Mellville and the Worlds of Civil War Poetry. Leviathan 16: 135–152. Also, C. S. Lewis created a dozen proverbs in The Horse and His Boy,Unseth, Peter. 2011. A culture "full of choice apophthegms and useful maxims": invented proverbs in C.S. Lewis' The Horse and His Boy Proverbium 28: 323–338. and Mercedes Lackey created dozens for her invented Shin'a'in and Tale'edras cultures;Proverbs from Velgarth – http://www.dragonlordsnet.com/danp.htm Lackey's proverbs are notable in that they are reminiscent to those of Ancient Asia – e.g. "Just because you feel certain an enemy is lurking behind every bush, it doesn't follow that you are wrong" is like to "Before telling secrets on the road, look in the bushes." These authors are notable for not only using proverbs as integral to the development of the characters and the story line, but also for creating proverbs.
Among medieval literary texts, Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde plays a special role because Chaucer's usage seems to challenge the truth value of proverbs by exposing their epistemological unreliability.Richard Utz, " Sic et Non: Zu Funktion und Epistemologie des Sprichwortes bei Geoffrey Chaucer," Das Mittelalter: Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung 2.2 (1997), 31–43. Rabelais used proverbs to write an entire chapter of Gargantua.p. 903. Taylor, Archer. 1950. Proverbs. Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, Maria Leach ed. 902–905. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
The patterns of using proverbs in literature can change over time. A study of "classical Chinese novels" found proverb use as frequently as one proverb every 3,500 words in the Water Margin ( Shuihu zhuan) and one proverb every 4,000 words in Wen Jou-hsiang. But modern Chinese novels have fewer proverbs by far.Eberhard, W. 1967. Some notes on the use of proverbs in Chinese novels. Proverbium no. 9: 201–208.
Proverbs (or portions of them) have been the inspiration for titles of books: The Bigger they Come by Erle Stanley Gardner, and Birds of a Feather (several books with this title), Devil in the Details (multiple books with this title). Sometimes a title alludes to a proverb, but does not actually quote much of it, such as The Gift Horse's Mouth by Robert Campbell. Some books or stories have titles that are twisted proverbs, anti-proverbs, such as No use dying over spilled milk,Myers, Tamar. 1996. No use dying over spelled milk. New York: Penguin Books. When life gives you lululemons,Weisburger, Lauren. 2018. When life gives you lululemons. Simon & Schuster. and two books titled Blessed are the Cheesemakers.Lynch, Sarah-Kate. 2004. Blessed are the Cheesemakers. Grand Central Publications and Tricia Goyr & Cara Putman. 2016. Blessed are the Cheesemakers. The twisted proverb of last title was also used in the Monty Python movie Life of Brian, where a person mishears one of Jesus Christ's beatitudes, "I think it was 'Blessed are the cheesemakers.'"
Some books and stories are built around a proverb. Some of Tolkien's books have been analyzed as having "governing proverbs" where "the action of a book turns on or fulfills a proverbial saying."p. 332. Stanton, Michael. 1996. "Advice is a dangerous gift": (Pseudo)proverbs in The Lord of the Rings. Proverbium 13:331–346. Some stories have been written with a proverb overtly as an opening, such as "A stitch in time saves nine" at the beginning of "Kitty's Class Day", one of Louisa May Alcott's Proverb Stories. Other times, a proverb appears at the end of a story, summing up a moral to the story, frequently found in Aesop's Fables, such as "Heaven helps those who help themselves" from Hercules and the Wagoner.p. 19. Kent, Graeme. 1991. Aesop's Fables. Newmarket, UK: Brimax. In a novel by the Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma, "proverbs are used to conclude each chapter".p. 86. Repinecz, Jonathon. 2013. Whose Hero? Reinventing Epic in French West African Literature. University of California, Berkeley: PhD dissertation.
Proverbs have also been used strategically by poets.Sobieski, Janet and Wolfgang Mieder. 2005. "So many heads, so many wits": An anthology of English proverb poetry. (Supplement Series of Proverbium, 18.) Burlington, VT: University of Vermont. Sometimes proverbs (or portions of them or ) are used for titles, such as "A bird in the bush" by Lord Kennet and his stepson Peter Scott and "The blind leading the blind" by Lisa Mueller. Sometimes, multiple proverbs are important parts of poems, such as Paul Muldoon's "Symposium", which begins "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it hold its nose to the grindstone and hunt with the hounds. Every dog has a stitch in time..." In Finnish there are proverb poems written hundreds of years ago.Lauhakangas, Outi. "The Oldest Finnish Proverb Poems in Relation to the Matti Kuusi International Database od Proverbs." Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 45.3–4 (2000): 401–420. The Turkish poet Refiki wrote an entire poem by stringing proverbs together, which has been translated into English poetically yielding such verses as "Be watchful and be wary, / But seldom grant a boon; / The man who calls the piper / Will also call the tune."A. L. Macfie and F. A. Macfie. 2001. A Proverb Poem by Refiki. Asian Folklore Studies Vol. 60, Issue 1, pp. 5–19. Eliza Griswold also created a poem by stringing proverbs together, Libyan proverbs translated into English.Griswold, Eliza. 2012, Libyan Proverbs. Poetry 201.3:372–377.
Because proverbs are familiar and often pointed, they have been used by a number of hip-hop poets. This has been true not only in the USA, birthplace of hip-hop, but also in Nigeria. Since Nigeria is so multilingual, hip-hop poets there use proverbs from various languages, mixing them in as it fits their need, sometimes translating the original. For example,
"They forget say ogbon ju agbaralo
They forget that wisdom is greater than power"p. 43. Akande, Akinmade Timothy and Adebayo
Mosobalaje. 2014. The use of proverbs in hip-hop music: The example of Yoruba proverbs in 9ices's music. Proverbium 31:35–58.
Some authors have bent and twisted proverbs, creating anti-proverbs, for a variety of literary effects. For example, in the Harry Potter novels, J. K. Rowling reshapes a standard English proverb into "It's no good crying over spilt potion" and Dumbledore advises Harry not to "count your owls before they are delivered".Heather A. Haas. 2011. The Wisdom of Wizardsand Muggles and Squibs: Proverb Use in the World of Harry Potter. Journal of American Folklore 124(492): 38. In a slightly different use of reshaping proverbs, in the Aubrey–Maturin series of historical naval novels by Patrick O'Brian, Capt. Jack Aubrey humorously mangles and mis-splices proverbs, such as "Never count the bear's skin before it is hatched" and "There's a good deal to be said for making hay while the iron is hot."Jan Harold Brunvand. 2004. "The Early Bird Is Worth Two in the Bush": Captain Jack Aubrey's Fractured Proverbs. What Goes Around Comes Around: The Circulation of Proverbs in Contemporary Life, Kimberly J. Lau, Peter Tokofsky, Stephen D. Winick, (eds.), pp. 152–170. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press. digitalcommons.usu.edu Earlier than O'Brian's Aubrey, Beatrice Grimshaw also used repeated splicings of proverbs in the mouth of an eccentric marquis to create a memorable character in The Sorcerer's Stone,Unseth, Peter. 2020. Beatrice Grimshaw’s Proverb Splicer and Her Artful Use of Proverbs. Proverbium 37:341–358. such as "The proof of the pudding sweeps clean" (p. 109) and "A stitch in time is as good as a mile" (p. 97).Grimshaw, Beatrice. 1914. The Sorcerer’s Stone. Philadelphia: John Winston.
Because proverbs are so much a part of the language and culture, authors have sometimes used proverbs in historical fiction effectively, but anachronistically, before the proverb was actually known. For example, the novel Ramage and the Rebels, by Dudley Pope is set in approximately 1800. Captain Ramage reminds his adversary "You are supposed to know that it is dangerous to change horses in midstream" (p. 259), with another allusion to the same proverb three pages later. However, the proverb about changing horses in midstream is reliably dated to 1864, so the proverb could not have been known or used by a character from that period.p. 49, Jennifer Speake. 2008. The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, 5th ed. Oxford University Press.
Some authors have used so many proverbs that there have been entire books written cataloging their proverb usage, such as Charles Dickens,George Bryan and Wolfgang Mieder. 1997. The Proverbial Charles Dickens. New York: Peter Lang Agatha Christie,George B. Bryan. 1993. Black Sheep, Red Herrings, and Blue Murder: The Proverbial Agatha Christie. Bern: Peter Lang George Bernard Shaw,George B. Bryan and Wolfgang Mieder. 1994. The Proverbial Bernard Shaw: An Index to Proverbs in the Works of George Bernard Shaw. Heinemann Educational Books. Miguel de Cervantes,Mieder, Wolfgang. 2006. Tilting at Windmills History & Meaning of a Proverbial Allusion to Cervantes Don Quixote. Burlington: University of Vermont. Mieder, Wolfgang. 2017. "Stringing proverbs together: The proverbial language in Miguel Cervantes's "Don Quixote". (Supplement series to Provebium, 38.) Burlington: University of Vermont. and Friedrich Nietzsche.Andreas Nolte, Wolfgang Mieder. 2012. "Zu meiner Hölle will ich den Weg mit guten Sprüchen pflastern". Friedrich Nietzsches sprichwörtliche Sprache. Broschu.
On the non-fiction side, proverbs have also been used by authors for articles that have no connection to the study of proverbs. Some have been used as the basis for book titles, e.g. I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for Self by April Lane Benson. Some proverbs been used as the basis for article titles, though often in altered form: "All our eggs in a broken basket: How the Human Terrain System is undermining sustainable military cultural competence"Connable, Ben. (2009). All our eggs in a broken basket: How the Human Terrain System is undermining sustainable military cultural competence. Military Review, March–April: 57–64. and "Should Rolling Stones Worry About Gathering Moss?",MUNISHWAR NATH GUPTA. 2017. Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy 83 No. 4: 741–743. "Between a Rock and a Soft Place",Denig, Stephen J. Between a Rock and a Soft Place. Christian Higher Education 11.1 (2012): 44–61. and the pair "Verbs of a feather flock together"Lederer, Anne, Henry Gleitman, and Lila Gleitman. "Verbs of a feather flock together: Semantic information in the structure of maternal speech." Beyond names for things: Young children’s acquisition of verbs 277–297 (1995) and "Verbs of a feather flock together II".Gleitman, Lila R. "Verbs of a feather flock together II." Amsterdam Studies in the Theorgy and History of Linguistic Science Series 4 (2002): 209–232. Proverbs have been noted as common in subtitles of articlesp. 154. Introduction to Paremiology. A Comprehensive Guide to Proverb Studies edited by Hrisztalina Hrisztova-Gotthardt and Melita Aleksa Varga. Berlin: De Gruyter Open. Online: Open Access version. such as "Discontinued intergenerational transmission of Czech in Texas: 'Hindsight is better than foresight'."Cope, Lida. 2006. "Discontinued intergenerational transmission of Czech in Texas: 'Hindsight is better than foresight'." Southern Journal of Linguistics 30(2):1–49. Also, the reverse is found with a proverb (complete or partial) as the title, then an explanatory subtitle, "To Change or Not to Change Horses: The World War II Elections".Norpoth, Helmut. 2012. "To Change or Not to Change Horses: The World War II Elections." Presidential Studies Quarterly Volume 42, Issue 2: 324–342. Many authors have cited proverbs as epigrams at the beginning of their articles, e.g. "'If you want to dismantle a hedge, remove one thorn at a time' Somali proverb" in an article on peacemaking in Somalia.Ismail I. Ahmed and Reginald H. Green. 1999. The heritage of war and state collapse in Somalia and Somaliland. Third World Quarterly 20.1:113–127. An article about research among the Māori used a Māori proverb as a title, then began the article with the Māori form of the proverb as an epigram "Set the overgrown bush alight and the new flax shoots will spring up", followed by three paragraphs about how the proverb served as a metaphor for the research and the present context.Pia Pohatu and Tui Aroha Warmenhoven. 2007. Set the overgrowth alight and the new shoots will spring forth: New directions in community based research. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Scholarship, Special supplement, 109–127. A British proverb has even been used as the title for a doctoral dissertation: Where there is muck there is brass.Abramson, Tony. 2016. Where there’s muck there’s brass! Coinage in the Northumbrian landscape and economy, c.575-c.867. Leeds University: Doctoral dissertation. Proverbs have also been used as a framework for an article.Blitt, Robert C. "Babushka Said Two Things-It Will Either Rain or Snow; It Either Will or Will Not: An Analysis of the Provisions and Human Rights Implications of Russia's New Law on Non-Governmental Organizations as Told through Eleven Russian Proverbs." Geo. Wash. Int'l L. Rev. 40 (2008): 1–86.
A film that makes rich use of proverbs is Forrest Gump, known for both using and creating proverbs.Stephen David Winick. 1998. "The proverb process: Intertextuality and proverbial innovation in popular culture". University of Pennsylvania dissertation.Stephen David Winick. 2013. Proverb is as proverb does. Proverbium30:377–428. Other studies of the use of proverbs in film include work by Kevin McKenna on the Russian film Aleksandr Nevsky,Kevin McKenna. 2009. "Proverbs and the Folk Tale in the Russian Cinema: The Case of Sergei Eisenstein's Film Classic Aleksandr Nevsky." The Proverbial «Pied Piper» A Festschrift Volume of Essays in Honor of Wolfgang Mieder on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. by Kevin McKenna, pp. 277–292. New York, Bern: Peter Lang. Haase's study of an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood,Donald Haase. 1990. Is seeing believing? Proverbs and the adaptation of a fairy tale. Proverbium 7: 89–104. Elias Dominguez Barajas on the film Viva Zapata!,Elias Dominguez Baraja. 2010. The function of proverbs in discourse, p. 66, 67. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. and Aboneh Ashagrie on The Athlete (a movie in Amharic about Abebe Bikila).Aboneh Ashagrie. 2013. The Athlete: a movie about the Ethiopian barefooted Olympic champion. Journal of African Cultural Studies Vol. 25, No. 1, 119–121.
Television programs have also been named with reference to proverbs, usually shortened, such Birds of a Feather and Diff'rent Strokes.
In the case of Forrest Gump, the screenplay by Eric Roth had more proverbs than the novel by Winston Groom, but for The Harder They Come, the reverse is true, where the novel derived from the movie by Michael Thelwell has many more proverbs than the movie.Coteus, Stephen. 2011. "Trouble never sets like rain": Proverb (in)direction in Michael Thelwell's The Harder They Come. Proverbium 28:1–30.
Éric Rohmer, the French film director, directed a series of films, the "Comedies and Proverbs", where each film was based on a proverb: The Aviator's Wife, The Perfect Marriage, Pauline at the Beach, Full Moon in Paris (the film's proverb was invented by Rohmer himself: "The one who has two wives loses his soul, the one who has two houses loses his mind."), The Green Ray, Boyfriends and Girlfriends.Pym, John. 1986/1987. Silly Girls. Sight and Sound 56.1:45–48.
Movie titles based on proverbs include Murder Will Out (1939 film), Try, Try Again, and The Harder They Fall. A twisted anti-proverb was the title for a Three Stooges film, A Bird in the Head. The title of an award-winning Turkish film, Three Monkeys, also invokes a proverb, though the title does not fully quote it.
They have also been used as the titles of plays:Bryan, George. 2002. Proverbial titles of dramas. Proverbium 19:65–74. Baby with the Bathwater by Christopher Durang, Dog Eat Dog by Mary Gallagher, and The Dog in the Manger by Charles Hale Hoyt. The use of proverbs as titles for plays is not, of course, limited to English plays: Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée (A door must be open or closed) by Paul de Musset. Proverbs have also been used in musical dramas, such as The Full Monty, which has been shown to use proverbs in clever ways.Konstantinova, Anna. 2012. Proverbs in an American musical: A cognitive-discursive study of "The Full Monty". Proverbium 29:67–93. In the lyrics for Beauty and the Beast, Gaston plays with three proverbs in sequence, "All roads lead to.../The best things in life are.../All's well that ends with...me."
In English the proverb (or rather the beginning of the proverb), If the shoe fits has been used as a title for three albums and five songs. Other English examples of using proverbs in musicBryan, Geoerge. 2001. An unfinished List of Anglo-American Proverb Songs. Proverbium 18:15–56. include Elvis Presley's Easy come, easy go, Harold Robe's Never swap horses when you're crossing a stream, Arthur Gillespie's Absence makes the heart grow fonder, Bob Dylan's Like a rolling stone, Cher's Apples don't fall far from the tree. Lynn Anderson made famous a song full of proverbs, I never promised you a rose garden (written by Joe South). In choral music, we find Michael Torke's Proverbs for female voice and ensemble. A number of Blues musicians have also used proverbs extensively.Taft, Michael. 1994. Proverbs in the Blues. Proverbium 12: 227–258.Prahlad, Sw. Anand. 1996. African-American Proverbs in Context. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. See pp. 77ff. The frequent use of proverbs in Country music has led to published studies of proverbs in this genre.Steven Folsom. 1993. A discography of American Country music hits employing proverb: Covering the years 1986–1992. Proceedings for the 1993. Conference of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association, ed. by Sue Poor, pp. 31–42. Stillwater, Oklahoma: The Association.Florian Gutman. 2007. "Because you're mine, I walk the line" Sprichwörliches in auswegewählten Liedern von Johnny Cash." Sprichwörter sind Goldes Wert, ed. by Wolfgang Mieder, pp. 177–194. (Supplement series of Proverbium 25). Burlington, VT: University of Vermont. The Reggae artist Jahdan Blakkamoore has recorded a piece titled Proverbs Remix. The opera Maldobrìe contains careful use of proverbs.V. Dezeljin. 1997. Funzioni testuali dei proverbi nel testo di Maldobrìe. Linguistica (Ljubljana) 37: 89–97. An extreme example of many proverbs used in composing songs is a song consisting almost entirely of proverbs performed by Bruce Springsteen, "My best was never good enough". The Mighty Diamonds recorded a song called simply "Proverbs".
The band Fleet Foxes used the proverb painting Netherlandish Proverbs for the cover of their album Fleet Foxes.Jones, Jonathan. "Why I judge albums by their covers." Wednesday 25 February 2009. The Guardian.
In addition to proverbs being used in songs themselves, some rock bands have used parts of proverbs as their names, such as the Rolling Stones, Bad Company, The Mothers of Invention, Feast or Famine, and Of Mice and Men. There have been at least two groups that called themselves "The Proverbs", and there is a hip-hop performer in South Africa known as "Proverb". In addition, many albums have been named with allusions to proverbs, such as Spilt milk (a title used by Jellyfish and also Kristina Train), The more things change by Machine Head, Silk purse by Linda Ronstadt, Another day, another dollar by DJ Scream Roccett, The blind leading the naked by Violent Femmes, What's good for the goose is good for the gander by Bobby Rush, Resistance is Futile by Steve Coleman, Murder will out by Fan the Fury. The proverb Feast or famine has been used as an album title by Chuck Ragan, Reef the Lost Cauze, Indiginus, and DaVinci. Whitehorse mixed two proverbs for the name of their album Leave no bridge unburned. The band Splinter Group released an album titled When in Rome, Eat Lions, referring to the proverb "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". The band Downcount used a proverb for the name of their tour, Come and take it.p. 10. Singh, Anup K. 2017. Dictionary of Proverbs. Neelkanth Prakashan Publishers.
Secondly, proverbs have often been visually depicted in a variety of media, including paintings, etchings, and sculpture. Jakob Jordaens painted a plaque with a proverb about drunkenness above a drunk man wearing a crown, titled The King Drinks. Probably the most famous examples of depicting proverbs are the different versions of the paintings Netherlandish Proverbs by the father and son Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Pieter Brueghel the Younger, the proverbial meanings of these paintings being the subject of a 2004 conference, which led to a published volume of studies (Mieder 2004a). The same father and son also painted versions of The Blind Leading the Blind, a Biblical proverb. These and similar paintings inspired another famous painting depicting some proverbs and also idioms (leading to a series of additional paintings), such as Proverbidioms by T. E. Breitenbach. Another painting inspired by Bruegel's work is by the Chinese artist, Ah To, who created a painting illustrating 81 Cantonese sayings. Corey Barksdale has produced a book of paintings with specific proverbs and pithy quotations.Corey Barksdale. 2011. Art & Inspirational Proverbs. Lulu.com. The British artist Chris Gollon has painted a major work entitled Big Fish Eat Little Fish, a title echoing Bruegel's painting of the same name.
Sometimes well-known proverbs are pictured on objects, without a text actually quoting the proverb, such as the three wise monkeys who remind us "Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil". When the proverb is well known, viewers are able to recognize the proverb and understand the image appropriately, but if viewers do not recognize the proverb, much of the effect of the image is lost. For example, there is a Japanese painting in the Bonsai museum in Saitama city that depicted flowers on a dead tree, but only when the curator learned the ancient (and no longer current) proverb "Flowers on a dead tree" did the curator understand the deeper meaning of the painting.p. 426. Yoko Mori. 2012. Review of Dictionary of Japanese Illustrated Proverbs. Proverbium 29:435–456. Also in Japan, an image of Mount Fuji, a hawk/falcon, and three egg plants, leads viewers to remember the proverb, "One Mt. Fuji, two falcons, three egg plants", a Hatsuyume dream predicting a long life.
A bibliography on proverbs in visual form has been prepared by Mieder and Sobieski (1999). Interpreting visual images of proverbs is subjective, but familiarity with the depicted proverb helps.pp. 203–213. Richard Honeck. 1997. A Proverb in Mind. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Some artists have used proverbs and anti-proverbs for titles of their paintings, alluding to a proverb rather than picturing it. For example, Vivienne LeWitt painted a piece titled "If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?", which shows neither foot nor shoe, but a woman counting her money as she contemplates different options when buying vegetables.
In 2018, 13 sculptures depicting Maltese proverbs were installed in open spaces of downtown Valletta.
The traditional Three wise monkeys were depicted in Bizarro with different labels. Instead of the negative imperatives, the one with ears covered bore the sign "See and speak evil", the one with eyes covered bore the sign "See and hear evil", etc. The caption at the bottom read "The power of positive thinking."June 26, 2011. Another cartoon showed a customer in a pharmacy telling a pharmacist, "I'll have an ounce of prevention."p. 126. Wolfgang Mieder. 1993. Proverbs are never out of season. New York: Oxford University Press. The comic strip The Argyle Sweater showed an Egyptian archeologist loading a mummy on the roof of a vehicle, refusing the offer of a rope to tie it on, with the caption "A fool and his mummy are soon parted."Aug 26, 2012. The comic One Big Happy showed a conversation where one person repeatedly posed a part of various proverb and the other tried to complete each one, resulting in such humorous results as "Don't change horses... unless you can lift those heavy diapers."July 8, 2012
Editorial cartoons can use proverbs to make their points with extra force as they can invoke the wisdom of society, not just the opinion of the editors.Weintraut, Edward James. 1999. "Michel und Mauer": Post-Unification Germany as seen through Editorial Cartoons. Die Unterrichtspraxis 32.2: 143–150. In an example that invoked a proverb only visually, when a US government agency (GSA) was caught spending money extravagantly, a cartoon showed a black pot labeled "Congress" telling a black kettle labeled "GSA", "Stop wasting the taxpayers' money!"Dana Summers, Orlando Sentinel, Aug 20, 2012. It may have taken some readers a moment of pondering to understand it, but the impact of the message was the stronger for it.
Cartoons with proverbs are so common that Wolfgang Mieder has published a collected volume of them, many of them editorial cartoons. For example, a German editorial cartoon linked a current politician to the Nazis, showing him with a bottle of swastika-labeled wine and the caption "In vino veritas".p. 389. Wolfgang Mieder. 2013. Neues von Sisyphus: Sprichwörtliche Mythen der Anike in moderner Literatur, Medien und Karikaturen. Bonn: Praesens.
One cartoonist very self-consciously drew and wrote cartoons based on proverbs for the University of Vermont student newspaper The Water Tower, under the title "Proverb place".Brienne Toomey. 2013. Old wisdom reimagined: Proverbial cartoons for university students. Proverbium 30: 333–346.
A few of the many proverbs adapted and used in advertising include:
The GEICO company has created a series of television ads that are built around proverbs, such as "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush", and "The pen is mightier than the sword", "Pigs may fly/Flying pig", "If a tree falls in the forest...", and "Words can never hurt you". Doritos made a commercial based on the proverb, "When pigs fly." Many advertisements that use proverbs shorten or amend them, such as, "Think outside the shoebox." Use of proverbs in advertising is not limited to the English language. Seda Başer Çoban has studied the use of proverbs in Turkish advertising.Seda Başer Çoban. 2010. Sözlü Gelenekten Sözün. Geleneksizliğine: Atasözü Ve Reklam From. Millî Folklor. pp. 22–27. Tatira has given a number of examples of proverbs used in advertising in Zimbabwe.Liveson Tatira. 2001. Proverbs in Zimbabwean advertisements. Journal of Folklore Research 38.3: 229–241. However, unlike the examples given above in English, all of which are anti-proverbs, Tatira's examples are standard proverbs. Where the English proverbs above are meant to make a potential customer smile, in one of the Zimbabwean examples "both the content of the proverb and the fact that it is phrased as a proverb secure the idea of a secure time-honored relationship between the company and the individuals". When newer buses were imported, owners of older buses compensated by painting a traditional proverb on the sides of their buses, "Going fast does not assure safe arrival".p. 233. Liveson Tatira. 2001. Proverbs in Zimbabwean advertisements. Journal of Folklore Research 38.3: 229–241.
The concept of "counter proverb" is more about pairs of contradictory proverbs than about the use of proverbs to counter each other in an argument. For example, from the Tafi language of Ghana, the following pair of proverbs are counter to each other but are each used in appropriate contexts, "A co-wife who is too powerful for you, you address her as your mother" and "Do not call your mother's co-wife your mother..."p. 425, 421. Mercy Bobuafor. 2013. The Grammar of Tafi. University of Leiden doctoral dissertation. link to dissertation In Nepali, there is a set of totally contradictory proverbs: "Religion is victorious and sin erodes" and "Religion erodes and sin is victorious".p. 378. Valerie Inchley. 2010. Sitting in my house dreaming of Nepal. Kathmandu: EKTA. Also, the following pair are counter proverbs from the Kasena of Ghana: "It is the patient person who will milk a barren cow" and "The person who would milk a barren cow must prepare for a kick on the forehead".p. 52, Helen Atawube Yitah. 2006. Saying Their Own 'truth': Kasena Women's (de)construction of Gender Through Proverbial Jesting. Doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California. From Lugbara language (of Uganda and Congo), there are a pair of counter proverbs: "The elephant's tusk does not ovewhelm the elephant" and "The elephant's tusks weigh the elephant down".p. 83, 84, Dalfovo, A. T. 1987. Lugbara Wisdom. Unisa Press. The two contradict each other, whether they are used in an argument or not (though indeed they were used in an argument). But the same work contains an appendix with many examples of proverbs used in arguing for contrary positions, but proverbs that are not inherently contradictory,p. 157–171, Helen Atawube Yitah. 2006. Saying Their Own 'truth': Kasena Women's (de)construction of Gender Through Proverbial Jesting. Doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California. such as "One is better off with hope of a cow's return than news of its death" countered by "If you don't know a goat before you mock at its skin". Though this pair was used in a contradictory way in a conversation, they are not a set of "counter proverbs".
Discussing counter proverbs in the Badaga language, Hockings explained that in his large collection "a few proverbs are mutually contradictory... we can be sure that the Badagas do not see the matter that way, and would explain such apparent contradictions by reasoning that proverb x is used in one context, while y is used in quite another."Paul Hockings. 1988. Counsel from the ancients: A study of Badaga proverbs, prayers, omens, and curses. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Comparing Korean proverbs, "when you compare two proverbs, often they will be contradictory." They are used for "a particular situation".p. 76. Jeyseon Lee. 2006. "Korean proverbs." In Korean language in culture and society, ed. by Ho-min Sohn, 74–85. University of Hawai'i Press.
"Counter proverbs" are not the same as a "paradoxical proverb", a proverb that contains a seeming paradox.Bendt Alster. 1975. Paradoxical Proverbs and Satire in Sumerian Literature. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 27.4: 201–230.
The most active field deliberately using proverbs is Christian ministry, where Joseph G. Healey and others have deliberately worked to catalyze the Paremiography from smaller languages and the application of them in a wide variety of church-related ministries, resulting in publications of collectionsAtido, George Pirwoth. 2011. Insights from Proverbs of the Alur in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Collaboration with African Proverb Saying and Stories, www.afriprov.org. Nairobi, Kenya. and applications.Moon, Jay. 2009. African Proverbs Reveal Christianity in Culture (American Society of Missiology Monograph, 5). Pickwick Publications. This attention to proverbs by those in Christian ministries is not new, many pioneering proverb collections having been collected and published by Christian workers.Christaller, Johann. 1879. Twi mmebuse̲m, mpensã-ahansĩa mmoaano: A collection of three thousand and six hundred Tshi proverbs, in use among the Negroes of the Gold coast speaking the Asante and Fante language, collected, together with their variations, and alphabetically arranged. Basel: The Basel German Evangelical Missionary Society.Bailleul, Charles. 2005. Sagesse Bambara – Proverbes et sentences. Bamako, Mali: Editions Donniya.Johnson, William F. 1892. Hindi Arrows for the Preacher's Bow. (Dharma Dowali) Allahabad, India: Christian Literature Society.Houlder, John. Alden (1885–1960). 1960. Ohabolana ou proverbes malgaches. Antananarivo: Imprimerie Luthérienne.
U.S. Navy Captain Edward Zellem pioneered the use of Afghan proverbs as a positive relationship-building tool during the war in Afghanistan, and in 2012 he published two bilingual collectionsZellem, Edward. 2012. Zellem, Edward. 2012. , now also available with translations into German, French, and Russian. of Afghan proverbs in Dari Persian and English, part of an effort of nationbuilding, followed by a volume of Pashto proverbs in 2014.Edward Zellem. 2014. Mataluna: 151 Afghan Pashto Proverbs. Tampa: Cultures Direct Press.
However, a number of scholars argue that such claims are not valid. They have used a variety of arguments. Grauberg argues that since many proverbs are so widely circulated they are reflections of broad human experience, not any one culture's unique viewpoint.Walter Grauberg. 1989. Proverbs and idioms: mirrors of national experience? Lexicographers and their works, ed. by Gregory James, 94–99. Exeter: University of Exeter. Related to this line of argument, from a collection of 199 American proverbs, Jente showed that only 10 were coined in the USA, so that most of these proverbs would not reflect uniquely American values.Richard Jente. 1931–1932. The American Proverb. American Speech 7:342–348. Giving another line of reasoning that proverbs should not be trusted as a simplistic guide to cultural values, Mieder once observed "proverbs come and go, that is, antiquated proverbs with messages and images we no longer relate to are dropped from our proverb repertoire, while new proverbs are created to reflect the mores and values of our time",Wolfgang Mieder. 1993. Proverbs are never out of season: Popular wisdom in the modern age. New York: Oxford University Press. so old proverbs still in circulation might reflect past values of a culture more than its current values. Also, within any language's proverb repertoire, there may be "counter proverbs", proverbs that contradict each other on the surface (see section above). When examining such counter proverbs, it is difficult to discern an underlying cultural value. With so many barriers to a simple calculation of values directly from proverbs, some feel "one cannot draw conclusions about values of speakers simply from the texts of proverbs".p. 261. Sw. Anand Prahlad. 1996. African American Proverbs in Context. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Many outsiders have studied proverbs to discern and understand cultural values and world view of cultural communities.Niemeyer, Larry L., "Proverbs : tools for world view studies : an exploratory comparison of the Bemba of Zambia and the Shona of Zimbabwe" (1982). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 886. http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/886 These outsider scholars are confident that they have gained insights into the local cultures by studying proverbs, but this is not universally accepted.Grauberg, Walter. 1989. Proverbs and idioms: mirrors of national experience? In Lexicographers and their works, ed. by Gregory James, 94–99. Exeter: University of Exeter.Whiting, Bartlett J. 1994. When evensong and morrowsong accord: Three essays on the proverb, edited by Joseph Harris and Wolfgang Mieder. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.p. xv. Mieder, Wolfgang. 2004b. Proverbs: A Handbook. (Greenwood Folklore Handbooks). Greenwood Press.p. 146. Mieder, Wolfgang. 2008. Proverbs speak louder than words: Folk wisdom in art, culture, folklore, history, literature, and mass media. New York: Peter Lang.p. 124. Wolkomir, Richard. 2006. "Gold nuggets or fool's gold?" Magazine and newspaper articles on the (ir)relevance of proverbs and proverbial phrases, Wolfgang Mieder and Janet Sobieski, eds., 117–125. (Supplement Series of Proverbium, 22.) Burlington, VT: University of Vermont.
Seeking empirical evidence to evaluate the question of whether proverbs reflect a culture's values, some have counted the proverbs that support various values. For example, Moon lists what he sees as the top ten core cultural values of the Builsa society of Ghana, as exemplified by proverbs. He found that 18% of the proverbs he analyzed supported the value of being a member of the community, rather than being independent.p. 134. W. Jay Moon. 2009. African Proverbs Reveal Christianity in Culture: A Narrative Portrayal of Builsa Proverbs. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. This was corroboration to other evidence that collective community membership is an important value among the Builsa. In studying Tajik proverbs, Bell notes that the proverbs in his corpus "Consistently illustrate Tajik values" and "The most often observed proverbs reflect the focal and specific values" discerned in the thesis.p. 139 & 157. Evan Bell. 2009. An analysis of Tajik proverbs. Masters thesis, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics.
A study of English proverbs created since 1900 showed in the 1960s a sudden and significant increase in proverbs that reflected more casual attitudes toward sex.p. 120. Peter Unseth. Review of Dictionary of Modern Proverbs. American Speech 90.1:117–121. Since the 1960s was also the decade of the Sexual revolution, this shows a strong statistical link between the changed values of the decades and a change in the proverbs coined and used. Another study mining the same volume counted Anglo-American proverbs about religion to show that proverbs indicate attitudes toward religion are going downhill.Petrova, Roumyana. 2016. How Religious Are The Modern Anglo-American Proverbs: A Linguocultural Study. Proceedings of the world congress of the IASS/AIS, Editor in Chief: Kristian Bankov. . Web access
There are many examples where cultural values have been explained and illustrated by proverbs. For example, from India, the concept that birth determines one's nature "is illustrated in the oft-repeated proverb: there can be no friendship between grass-eaters and meat-eaters, between a food and its eater".p. 22, Patrick Olivelle. 2013. Talking Animals: Explorations in an Indian Literary Genre. Religions of South Asia 7.14–26. Proverbs have been used to explain and illustrate the Fula people cultural value of pulaaku.Rudolf Leger and Abubakar B. Mohammad. 2000. The concept of pulaaku mirrored in Fulfulde proverbs of the Gombe dialect. Berichte des Sonderforschungsbereichs 268, Band 14, Frankfurt a.M. 2000: 299–306. But using proverbs to illustrate a cultural value is not the same as using a collection of proverbs to discern cultural values. In a comparative study between Spanish and Jordanian proverbs it is defined the social imagination for the mother as an archetype in the context of role transformation and in contrast with the roles of husband, son and brother, in two societies which might be occasionally associated with sexist and /or rural ideologies.Sbaihat, Ahlam (2012). La imagen de la madre en el refranero español y jordano. Estudio de Paremiología comparada. España: Sociedad Española de Estudios Literarios de Cultura Popular, Oceanide, 5.
Some scholars have adopted a cautious approach, acknowledging at least a genuine, though limited, link between cultural values and proverbs: "The cultural portrait painted by proverbs may be fragmented, contradictory, or otherwise at variance with reality... but must be regarded not as accurate renderings but rather as tantalizing shadows of the culture which spawned them."p. 173.Sheila K. Webster. 1982. Women, Sex, and Marriage in Moroccan Proverbs. International Journal of Middle East Studies 14:173–184. There is not yet agreement on the issue of whether, and how much, cultural values are reflected in a culture's proverbs.
It is clear that the Soviet Union believed that proverbs had a direct link to the values of a culture, as they used them to try to create changes in the values of cultures within their sphere of domination. Sometimes they took old Russian proverbs and altered them into socialist forms.p. 84ff. Andrey Reznikov. 2009. Old wine in new bottles: Modern Russian anti-proverbs. (Supplement Series of Proverbium, 27.) Burlington, VT: University of Vermont These new proverbs promoted Socialism and its attendant values, such as atheism and collectivism, e.g. "Bread is given to us not by Christ, but by machines and collective farms" and "A good harvest is had only by a collective farm." They did not limit their efforts to Russian, but also produced "newly coined proverbs that conformed to socialist thought" in Tajik and other languages of the USSR.Evan Bell. 2009. An analysis of Tajik proverbs. Masters thesis, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics.
Clearly proverbs in religion are not limited to monotheists; among the Badagas of India (Shaivism Hindus), there is a traditional proverb "Catch hold of and join with the man who has placed sacred ash on."p. 601, Paul Hockings. 1988. Counsel from the Ancients: A study of Badaga proverbs, prayers, omens and curses. Berlin: de Gruyter. Proverbs are widely associated with large religions that draw from sacred books, but they are also used for religious purposes among groups with their own traditional religions, such as the Guji Oromo. The broadest comparative study of proverbs across religions is The eleven religions and their proverbial lore, a comparative study. A reference book to the eleven surviving major religions of the world by Selwyn Gurney Champion, from 1945. Some sayings from sacred books also become proverbs, even if they were not obviously proverbs in the original passage of the sacred book.Ziyad Mohammad Gogazeh and Ahmad Husein Al-Afif. 2007. Los proverbios árabes extraidos del Corán: recopilación, traducción, y estudio. Paremia 16: 129–138. For example, many quote "Be sure your sin will find you out" as a proverb from the Bible, but there is no evidence it was proverbial in its original usage (Numbers 32:23).
Not all religious references in proverbs are positive. Some are cynical, such as the Tajik and Uzbek proverb, "Do as the mullah says, not as he does."p. 130, Evan Bell. 2009. The wit and wisdom of the Tajiks: An analysis of Tajik proverbs. Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, MA thesis.p. 18. Ergashev, Moujrodkhon and Issokhon Niyozov. Proverbes et dictons d'Ouzbékistan. Paris: Editions Géorama, 2006. An Indian proverb is cynical about devotees of Hinduism: "Only When in distress, a man calls on Rama".p. 16, P. R. Gurdon. 1895. Some Assamese proverbs. Shillong, India: Assam Secretariat Printing Office. In the context of Tibetan Buddhism, some Ladakhi proverbs mock the lamas, e.g. "If the lama's own head does not come out cleanly, how will he do the drawing upwards of the dead?... used for deriding the immoral life of the lamas."p. 142. August Francke. 1901. A collection of Ladakhi proverbs. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 2: 135–148. There is an Italian proverb that mocks churches, "One barrel of wine can work more miracles than a church full of saints". There are so many Spanish proverbs mocking Catholic clergy that there is even a book of them, Refranero Anticlerical.Esteban, José. 2010. Reino de Cordelia. Armenians have a proverb that mocks priests, "Outside a priest, inside a beast."p. 284. Sakayan, Dora. Armenian Proverbs: A Paremiological Study with an Anthology of 2,500 Armenian Folk Sayings. Academic Resources Corp, 1994.
Proverbs do not have to explicitly mention religion or religious figures to be used to mock a religion, seen in the fact that in a collection of 555 proverbs from the Lur people, a Muslim group in Iran, the explanations for 15 of them use illustrations that mock Muslim clerics.Peter Unseth (2017). Review of Warm Hearts and Sharp Tongues: Life in 555 Proverbs from the Zagros Mountains of Iran. Iranian Studies 50:1, 163–167,
Dammann wrote, "In the [Traditional traditional religions]], specific religious ideas recede into the background... The influence of Islam manifests itself in African proverbs... Christian influences, on the contrary, are rare."p. 46. Ernst Dammann. 1972. Die Religion in Afrikanischen Sprichwörter und Rätseln. Anthropos 67:36–48. Quotation in English, from summary at end of article. If widely true in Africa, this is likely due to the longer presence of Islam in many parts of Africa. Reflection of Christian values is common in Amharic proverbs of Ethiopia, an area that has had a presence of Christianity for well over 1,000 years. The Islamic proverbial reproduction may also be shown in the image of some animals such as the dog. Although dog is portrayed in many European proverbs as the most faithful friend of man, it is represented in some Islamic countries as impure, dirty, vile, cowardly, ungrateful and treacherous, in addition to links to negative human superstitions such as loneliness, indifference and bad luck.Sharab, Moayad; Sbaihat, Ahlam; Al Duweiri, Hussein (2013). La imagen del perro en la paremiología jordana: traducción y contraste con el español. University of Granada: Language Design, Journal of Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics, vol. 14, n. 1.
===Noteworthy proverb scholars (paremiologists and paremiographers)===
In the 19th century, a growing number of scholars published collections of proverbs, such as Samuel Adalberg who published collections of Yiddish proverbs (1888 & 1890) and Polish proverbs (1889–1894). Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the Anglican bishop in Nigeria, published a collection of Yoruba language proverbs (1852). Elias Lönnrot published a collection of Finnish proverbs (1842).
From the 20th century onwards, proverb scholars were involved in not only collecting proverbs, but also analyzing and comparing proverbs. Alan Dundes was a 20th century American folklorist whose scholarly output on proverbs led Wolfgang Mieder to refer to him as a "pioneering paremiologist". Matti Kuusi was a 20th century Finnish paremiologist, the creator of the Matti Kuusi international type system of proverbs.Lauhakangas, Outi. 2013. The Matti Kuusi International Database of Proverbs. Oral Tradition 28/2 (2013): 217–222. ( Article on his Proverb Type System. ) With encouragement from Archer Taylor,Lauhakangas, Outi. 2014. Categorization of proverbs, p. 59. Introduction to Paremiology, ed. by Hrisztalina Hrisztova-Gotthardt and Melita Aleksa Varga, pp. 49–67. Berlin: de Gruyter. he founded the journal Proverbium: Bulletin d'Information sur les Recherches Parémiologiques, published from 1965 to 1975 by the Society for Finnish Literature, which was later restarted as an annual volume, . Archer Taylor was a 20th century American scholar, best known for his "magisterial"p. xiv, Mieder, Wolfgang. Proverbs: A handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. book The Proverb.1931. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dimitrios Loukatos was a 20th century Greek proverb scholar, author of such works as Aetiological Tales of Modern Greek Proverbs. Aetiological Tales of Modern Greek Proverbs (Ermis: Athens, 1972). Arvo Krikmann (1939–2017) was an Estonian proverb scholar, whom Wolfgang Mieder called "one of the leading paremiologists in the world"p. vi. Wolfgang Mieder. 2009. Editor’s Preface. Proverb semantics: Studies in structure, logic, and metaphor, edited by Wolfgang Mieder, pp. v-viii. (Supplement Series to Proverbium, 29.) Burlington, VT: University of Vermont. and "master folklorist and paremiologist".p. 5. Wolfgang Mieder. Arvo Krikmann: Master folklorist and paremiologist. Proverbium 31: 1–10. Elisabeth Piirainen was a German scholar with 50 proverb-related publications.p. 640–646. Wolfgang Mieder. 2009 International Bibliography of Paremiology and Phraseology. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Current proverb scholars have continued the trend to be involved in analysis as well as collection of proverbs. Claude Buridant is a 20th century French scholar whose work has concentrated on Romance languages.1976. Nature and function of proverbs in jeux-partis. Revue des sciences humaines 163.3 (1976): 377–418. Galit Hasan-Rokem is an Israeli scholar, associate editor of Proverbium: The yearbook of international proverb scholarship, since 1984. She has written on proverbs in Jewish traditions.Hasan-Rokem, Galit. Web of life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic literature. Stanford University Press, 2000. Joseph G. Healey is an American Catholic missionary in Kenya who has led a movement to sponsor African proverb scholars to collect proverbs from their own language communities.http://www.afriprov.org/index.php/meetings/624-minutes-of-the-meeting-of-the-african-proverbs-working-group-saturday-28-april-2012-.html Minutes of the Meeting of the African Proverbs Working Group, Christ the Teacher Parish, Kenyatta University Nairobi, Kenya, Saturday, 28 April 2012 This led Wolfgang Mieder to dedicate the "International Bibliography of New and Reprinted Proverb Collections" section of Proverbium 32 to Healey.p. 457. International Bibliography of New and Reprinted Proverb Collections. Proverbium 32: 457–466. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is a scholar of Jewish history and folklore, including proverbs.Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. "Toward a theory of proverb meaning." Proverbium 22 (1973): 821–827. Wolfgang Mieder is a German-born proverb scholar who has worked his entire academic career in the US. He is the editor of Proverbium and the author of the two volume International Bibliography of Paremiology and Phraseology.2009 International Bibliography of Paremiology and Phraseology. Berlin: de Gruyter. He has been honored by four festschrift publications.Kevin McKenna, ed. 2009. The Proverbial 'Pied Piper': A Festschrift Volume of Essays in Honor of Wolfgang Mieder on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday. New York: Peter Lang. Christian Grandl and Kevin McKenna, ed. 2015. Bis dat, qui cito dat Gegengabe in Paremiology, Folklore, Language and Literature Honoring Wolfgang Mieder on His Seventieth Birthday.Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Nolte, Andreas and Dennis Mahoney. 2019. Living by the Golden Rule: Mentor – Scholar – World Citizen: A Festschrift for Wolfgang Mieder’s 75th Birthday. Bern: Peter Lang. He has also been recognized by biographical publications that focused on his scholarship.Lauhakangas, Outi. 2012. In honorem Wolfgang Mieder. In Program of the Sixth Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Proverbs, 4th to 11th November 2012, at Tavira, Portugal, Rui B. Soares and Outi Lauhakangas, eds., pp. 81–84. Tavira: Tipograpfia Tavirense.Jones, Amy. 2012. Wolfgang Mieder: Ein Fuβ in beiden Ländern. In Sprache als Heimat, A. Jones, ed. Quasi. Middlebury College Zeitschrift 1:52–58. Dora Sakayan is a scholar who has written about German and Armenian studies, including Armenian Proverbs: A Paremiological Study with an Anthology of 2,500 Armenian Folk Sayings Selected and Translated into English. Armenian Proverbs: A Paremiological Study with an Anthology of 2,500 Armenian Folk Sayings Selected and Translated into English, Delmar & New York: Caravan Books, First edition: 1994, Second and revised edition: 1995 An extensive introduction addresses the language and structure,Sakayan, Dora. "On the Grammar of Armenian Proverbs." In: John A. C. Greppin (ed.), Proceedings. Fourth International Conference on Armenian Linguistics. Cleveland State University, Cleveland, September 14–19, 1991, Delmar & New York: Caravan Books, 1992, pp. 171–201 as well as the origin of Armenian proverbs (international, borrowed and specifically Armenian proverbs). Mineke Schipper is a Dutch scholar, best known for her book of worldwide proverbs about women, Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet – Women in Proverbs from Around the World.Yale University Press, 2004 Edward Zellem is an American proverb scholar who has edited books of Afghan proverbs, developed a method of collecting proverbs via the Web.Unseth, Peter. 2016. Comparing methods of collecting proverbs: Learning to value working with a community, p. 7. Comparing methods of collecting proverbs
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