Despite the near universality of proverbs and the long history of paremiology--the study of proverbs--we still have no clear, complete, and universally applicable definition of the proverb. Some students of the genre have elected to minimize or completely ignore the fundamental issue of defining their materials; Archer Taylor, a leading proverb scholar, wrote, "The definition of the proverb is too difficult to repay the undertaking. Still, may definitions have been attempted.
Most proposed definitions begin with some statement about the special form of the proverb, which has been described as brief, terse, economical, pithy, witty, full, impersonal, linguistically artful, and epigrammatic. The conciseness of the proverb is self-evident: Most proverbs consist of a single sentence. Folklorist Roger Abrahams has called them "among the shortest forms of traditional expression that call attention to themselves as formal artistic entities. In the final analysis it may be the form that defines the proverb; as Edward Westermarck, an influential ethnographer and collector of Moroccan proverbs, put it some fifty years ago:
The proverb contains some touch of fancy in the phrasing; it personifies inanimate objects or abstract conceptions; it is paradoxical, hyperbolic, pointed and pungent, pithy and epigrammatical; or it makes use of antithesis or parallelism or of rime [sic], alliteration, or puns. It is the form which gives most proverbs their salt.
Because they are short, proverbs are easily learned and easily employed, and for user and listener alike, they carry the authority of traditional wisdom.
Characteristics of Proverbs
If the people of a particular culture subscribe to belief in the inherent truth of their proverbs--and evidence of proverb use in serious circumstances such as education or legal proceedings indicates that they do--then it follows that there should be an authority upon which that truth is founded. The shared experiences of people over time spawned that which Lord Russell, an early English student of the genre, termed "the wisdom of many" summarized by "the wit of one" in proverb form, and then retransmitted by and to the ever-increasing "many. Traditional recognition of the validity of proverbial opinion is the supreme authority quoted when the oft-used formulaic lead-in to a proverb appears in English: "You know what they say
" The "authorities" cited when proverbs are used carry the weight of long-standing public consensus bolstered by the reassuring familiarity of tradition. The proverb links a new and individual experience to analogous situations in the past, and provides a response steeped in the wisdom of the ages. In tradition lies truth, or as "they" say in Lebanon, "A proverb never tells a lie."
Once a "truth" is established and the need for citing it arises, it must find a vehicle for expression. Language is that vehicle, and proverbs are simple, straightforward statements of fact. The vast majority are metaphorical, and thus they set up logical connections on several levels. For example, if I say, "You're jumping out of the frying pan into the fire," listeners must recognize the appropriateness of the proverb to the situation and work a mental equation: "Jumping out of the frying pan into the fire "equals "changing from situation A to situation B. But frying pans and fires aren't
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