This diverse collection of essays by prominent folklorists considers modern uses and contexts of proverbs and proverbial speech, some traditional and conventional, others new and unexpected. Together, they demonstrate the continuing pervasiveness and relevance of proverbs in American culture.

What Goes Around Comes Around

The Circulation of Proverbs in Contemporary Life

Utah State University Press

Copyright © 2004 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-592-2

Contents

Kimberly J. Lau, Peter Tokofsky, and Stephen D. Winick What Goes Around Comes Around: The Circulation of Proverbs in Contemporary Life.............................1Charles Clay Doyle "In Aqua Scribere": The Evolution of a Current Proverb..........................................................................................20Isaac Jack Lvy and Rosemary Lvy Zumwalt "From One Act of Charity, the World Is Saved": Creative Selection of Proverbs in Sephardic Narrative.....................37Shirley L. Arora Baseball as (Pan)America: A Sampling of Baseball-Related Metaphors in Spanish.....................................................................58Stephen D. Winick "You Can't Kill Shit": Occupational Proverb and Metaphorical System among Young Medical Professionals............................................86Jay Mechling "Cheaters Never Prosper" and Other Lies Adults Tell Kids: Proverbs and the Culture Wars over Character................................................107Anand Prahlad The Proverb and Fetishism in American Advertisements.................................................................................................127Jan Harold Brunvand "The Early Bird Is Worth Two in the Bush": Captain Jack Aubrey's Fractured Proverbs............................................................152Alan Dundes As the Crow Flies: A Straightforward Study of Lineal Worldview in American Folk Speech.................................................................171Contributors and Editors............................................................................................................................................188

Chapter One

What Goes Around Comes Around

The Circulation of Proverbs in Contemporary Life

Kimberly J. Lau, Peter I. Tokofsky, and Stephen D. Winick

Introduction

When it comes to proverb scholarship, we have all been taught by the same master, Wolfgang Mieder, without question one of the greatest paremiologists of all time. His body of work on proverbs is so extensive as to make it nearly impossible to say anything new, but we nonetheless dedicate our efforts in this collection to that very purpose as a way of thanking him for his brilliant leadership in the field of international proverb scholarship, his unsurpassed intellectual generosity, and his incredible humor, kindness, and spirit. We only hope that the essays in this volume do justice to the ever-increasing ways he has inspired us to think about proverbs in all their various contexts and manifestations. Thus, the title of our book, What Goes Around Comes Around, is meant first to honor Wolfgang Mieder, to convey our deep appreciation not only for his intellectual influence on our work but also for his wonderful presence in all of our lives.

The circulation of proverbs in our everyday lives reminds us that folklore is, indeed, a truly dynamic process. The vitality of proverbs-the constant emergence of new proverbs, together with their continual expression in new contexts-captures the ways in which folklore draws together our gravest concerns and our strongest commitments, our most precious values and our wisest perspectives, at times even our coarsest humor and our basest beliefs, thereby structuring the world around us. In this collection, we look specifically at proverbs as they go out into the world beyond their usual contexts ("what goes around") as well as the ways in which the world beyond traditional folklore comes into being through the creation and recontextualization of new proverbs ("what comes around"). The diverse perspectives and analyses in these essays raise the question of what, precisely, is meant by proverb. Thus, we begin by reviewing the long tradition of scholarship that endeavors to define this dynamic genre of folklore.

Proverbs: What They Are and What They Do

One of the great paradoxes of the proverb is that it is generally understood to epitomize simplicity and common sense, but it turns out to be both complex and hard to define. Although most people can list many examples of proverbs, few can accurately define what makes them proverbial. Scholars have discussed proverbs for hundreds of years, and hundreds of different definitions have been advanced, making it impossible to provide even a cursory summary of them. Instead, we offer a brief overview of some of the classic scholarship on proverbs, and then touch briefly on recent and more unconventional definitions.

Because proverbs are both linguistic items (possessing concrete elements of verbal and logical structure) and behaviors (possessing motives, strategies, and outcomes), it is imperative to discuss not only what they are in linguistic and structural senses but also what they do in social and behavioral ones. Proverbs are, first of all, messages passed between and among people. They are principally expressed in speech, though they can also be transmitted through writing, visual arts, and electronic communication. In their verbal form, they are brief and pithy, wise and witty, rhetorically forceful but discreetly indirect. They include old sayings like "A rolling stone gathers no moss," as well as recent ones such as "You snooze, you lose." They can be as short as two words ("Money talks"), or they can be thirty times as long ("For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost; for want of a horse, the rider was lost; for want of a rider, the message was lost; for want of a message, the battle was lost; for want of the battle, the war was lost; and all for the want of horseshoe nail").

But aside from memorizing lists of proverbs, how can we tell if any given utterance can be considered a proverb? In some cultures and situations, we are lucky that proverbs are preceded by a framing device: "You know what they say"; "As someone once said"; or, in some locales, "We have a proverb for that." In most cases, though, we need to look for other clues. Sometimes proverbial messages are metaphorical so that, for example, being circumspect in signing a mortgage can be described as "looking before you leap." Sometimes proverbs are poetic, featuring rhyme ("No pain, no gain"; "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise"), near rhyme ("Honesty is the best policy"; "A stitch in time saves nine"), regular meter ("There's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip"; "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"), or alliteration ("Where there's a will, there's a way"; "Love laughs at locksmiths"). Sometimes they use unusual or archaic syntax ("He who hesitates is lost"; "Here today, gone tomorrow"; "It's an ill wind that blows nobody good"). Although all of these attributes apply to many proverbs, none of them is present in every one. How, then, is it possible to determine what constitutes proverbiality?

This problem has been discussed since ancient times; philosophers like Plato and Aristotle had much to say about proverbs, though they were not always referring to the same kinds of expressions we call proverbs today. For instance, Aristotle calls the phrase "an Attic neighbor" a proverb, though today it would be considered an idiom at best. Still, classical and medieval definitions of the proverb do include statements of intuitive and descriptive power, such as Michael Apostolius of Byzantium's dictum:

A proverb is a statement which conceals the clear in the unclear, or which through concrete images indicates intellectual concepts, or which makes clear the truth in furtive fashion. And further in this fashion, a proverb is ... a trite phrase constantly used in popular speech ... or a saying that has become thoroughly habitual in our daily customs and life. (Apostolius, quoted in Whiting 1994, 65)

Two American scholars, writing in the 1930s, ushered in the modern era of proverb study by summarizing and evaluating the centuries of scholarship before them. The first, Archer Taylor, rejected out of hand the possibility of creating a strict and orderly definition in a famous passage from his book The Proverb:

The definition of the proverb is too difficult to repay the undertaking; and should we fortunately combine within a single definition all the essential elements and give each its proper emphasis, even then we would not 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.... Let us be content with saying that a proverb is a saying current among the folk. At least so much of a definition is indisputable.... (Taylor 1985, 3)

Taylor's influence on other definitions began almost immediately. Spurred to action by his colleague's statement, B. J. Whiting published "The Nature of the Proverb" in 1932. Whiting's article draws ideas about proverbs from classical authors, medieval writers, and a whole host of English men of letters. Out of these varied ingredients, Whiting constructs his own definition of the proverb, which stands today as an often-quoted and much-admired statement about the nature of proverbiality:

A proverb is an expression which, owing its birth to the people, testifies to its origin in form and phrase. It expresses an apparently 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 a figurative meaning.... A proverb 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. (Whiting 1994, 80)

Both passages proceed from an intelligent recognition of the difficulties inherent in the nature of proverbs, but both also have their weaknesses. Taylor uses the vague term "saying" to describe the type of expression that may be a proverb but never explains what he means by it. The lack of a more precise description of proverbs boils Taylor's definition down to one feature: "currency" among "the folk," but even that is problematic; the concept of "the folk" is not elucidated, either. Currency, in Taylor's sense, apparently means that the proverb is repeated frequently-though just how often it must be repeated is again undefined.

Whiting's passage, while it is more thorough, can be reduced to a similar result: Where Taylor uses "saying," Whiting calls the proverb an "expression," but what exactly does he mean? Surely every utterance owes its birth to people; what does he mean by "the people"? All the concrete characteristics Whiting mentions (rhyme, alliteration, brevity, truth, and double meaning) are optional, not present in every proverb. Every point of this definition is therefore either very vague or so specific it applies only to some proverbs. The only easily defined characteristic Whiting claims proverbs must unequivocally have is age, and the proper test of age, he tells us, is repetition.

Like Taylor, then, Whiting finds that belonging to a cultural canon of repeated sayings is the most essential quality defining proverbiality. While Taylor uses currency to express this idea, Whiting uses age. For both scholars, the test of this feature is the same: If the proverb can be found in multiple places, it is likely to have both age enough for Whiting and currency enough for Taylor. In this, Taylor and Whiting were following an old tradition in English-language scholarship; the first definition of the proverb in English seems to be that of Thomas More, who in 1528 called it simply "an old said saw" or a saying long said (Whiting 1994, 69).

Whiting also contributes one more crucial idea to our understanding of proverbs: The proverb, he tells us, "expresses an apparently fundamental truth." This characteristic, combined with age and currency, is essentially the basis of many, if not most, proverb definitions. One of the world's finest proverb scholars, Wolfgang Mieder, for example, follows his own teacher Stuart Gallacher (1959, 47) and adapts that scholar's definition to "a Proverb is a concise statement of an apparent truth that has [had, or will have] some currency among the people" (Mieder 1993, 14). This then, at its basic level, is what the proverb is: a saying encapsulating a culturally recognized truth, repeated until it is recognized as traditional.

However, most scholars are not satisfied with this level of description, and many have tried to provide a more concrete or rigorous definition. In particular, citing logical and structural composition has become an important means of defining proverbs. This has resulted in a rich literature, but also a broad and disparate one, with such ideas as "analogic structure" (Crpeau 1975), "topic-comment structure" (Dundes 1981), and "quadripartite structure" (Milner 1969a), all advanced as possible definitional models. (For other structural possibilities, see Seitel 1981; Priebe 1971; Milner 1969b; Barley 1972; Permiakov 1979; Cram 1994; Grzybek 1994). Because proverbs exhibit such a variety of structures on the surface, and because there are many kinds of structures (e.g., syntactic, logical, conceptual, etc.), scholars must resort to analyzing deep structures. These they derive themselves from the proverbs they analyze, interpreting them as they see fit. This leaves a lot of room for other scholars to disagree, and, predictably, their work has not led to widely accepted definitions.

Some scholars have approached the problem from a different angle, asking, "Is there some other way we recognize the traditional nature of the proverb, besides by having heard it before?" Shirley Arora (1994) found that among Spanish speakers poetic features such as rhyme were as important as a previous hearing in people's decisions about what a proverb was. But poetic features, as already explained, are not present in every proverb, and thus it is difficult to define a proverb by their presence or absence.

Since proverbs cannot easily be defined by what they are, scholars have also tried to define them by what they do. Instead of analyzing the linguistic or logical structure, these students of the proverb analyze its rhetorical and social functions. This approach also has a long history. Hermogenes of Tarsus, a Sophistic rhetorician of the second century C.E., wrote that "a proverb is a summary saying, in a statement of general application, dissuading from something or persuading toward something, or showing what is the nature of each" (Hermogenes, quoted in Whiting 1994, 59). This essentially rhetorical definition still describes many instances of proverbial speech today, making it one of the earliest proverb definitions still recognizable in the modern world.

Hermogenes' definition does not account for every proverbial utterance, however. Proverbs can persuade and dissuade, but they can also accomplish many other rhetorical goals: They can express deference or confidence or worry, instill fear or respect, or even mock the listener. Recognizing this, modern proverb scholars tend to follow philosopher of language Kenneth Burke, who describes proverbs as "strategies for dealing with situations" (Burke 1957, 296).

Burke points out that proverbs name and sum up certain recurrent social situations. For example, a man is taking a long time to make up his mind, and we think he needs to act more quickly. This is a commonly recurring situation, and we have many proverbs to deal with it. We can say, "He who hesitates is lost," or "When opportunity knocks, answer the door," or "Strike while the iron is hot," or "Shit or get off the pot," or even "You snooze, you lose." All these send the same message: Act now.

As Burke's theory suggests, proverbial speech is a complex process. First, we recognize a situation in our life as a special instance of a social situation or context that recurs. Then we realize that there is a proverb for that recurrent situation. We speak the proverb in an attempt to contribute to the conversation. Our goal is to recast the specific, unique situation as a version of the general, recurrent one, and if we are successful, our hearer will understand the implied advice. Burke's approach to proverbs, first published in 1941, has been very influential and informs the work of such scholars as Abrahams (1968, 1972), Seitel (1981), Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1981), Briggs (1994), Yankah (1989), Prahlad (1996), and Winick (1998, 2003), all of whom have contributed to our understanding of proverbs as rhetorical strategies and devices of communication.

Ideally, a successful proverb definition would answer both of our initial questions: What are proverbs (how they are internally constructed?), and what do they do (how do they communicate or make meaning?)? A few, like Crpeau's definition of the proverb as "a sentence with analogic structure and normative function" (1975, 303), touch on both questions, but more often proverb definitions address only one of the two.

(Continues...)

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