Proverbs: an argument compressed into eight words

A proverb is a short, fixed, memorable statement expressing a general observation, deployed in conversation to make a point about a specific situation.

The form is close to universal. Every documented language has them, collections have been made for millennia, and in several traditions proverb use is a marked rhetorical skill — something people are admired for doing well.

Why they contradict each other

English offers plenty of examples. Look before you leap, and he who hesitates is lost. Many hands make light work, and too many cooks spoil the broth. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and out of sight, out of mind.

This is frequently presented as evidence that proverbs are empty. It is better read as evidence about how they work.

A proverb is not a universal law. It is a claim that this situation is an instance of that pattern. The skill lies in the matching — recognising which pattern applies here — and the existence of an opposing proverb means the tradition has recognised that the opposite pattern also occurs.

The proverb pair is a pair of tools. Choosing between them is the actual judgement, and the tradition supplies both rather than pretending one is always right.

What makes them stick

Proverbs are engineered for memory, though nobody engineered them — the ones that survived are the ones that were easy to remember.

The recurring features across languages: brevity, rhythm, parallel structure, rhyme or alliteration, concrete imagery, and frequently an omitted verb or connective that makes the structure tighter.

The imagery is nearly always drawn from the immediate material world — agriculture, animals, weather, cooking, tools, the body. Abstractions are rare, which is part of what makes proverbs feel grounded and part of why they date: proverbs about oxen and looms outlive the oxen and the looms.

How they are used

In many traditions, a proverb ends an argument. It appeals to shared inherited wisdom rather than to the speaker's own authority, which allows a point to be made without the speaker taking full responsibility for it.

That indirection is the crucial function. A proverb lets someone criticise, warn or advise without direct confrontation. In societies where direct criticism between certain parties is difficult, this matters enormously.

In several West African traditions, proverb use is a recognised rhetorical art, particularly in formal speech, dispute settlement and negotiation. Chinua Achebe's frequently quoted line about proverbs being the palm oil with which words are eaten describes exactly this — they are what makes speech go down.

Proverbs also appear on objects: woven into cloth, carved into stools and doors, cast into weights. A proverb encoded in an object is a statement that is present without being said.

The travelling ones

Some proverbs are found across enormous areas in near-identical form, spread by trade, migration, translation and shared religious texts.

Others look identical and are not — the same observation arrived at independently, which is unsurprising when the observation concerns something everyone experiences. Proverbs about the weather, about children resembling parents, about the difficulty of unsaying words, and about the untrustworthiness of appearances turn up everywhere.

Distinguishing borrowing from independent invention is genuinely difficult, and comparative proverb scholarship spends a lot of effort on it.

What they encode

Proverbs are frequently mined for cultural values, and the mining should be done carefully.

They do reflect concerns — a proverb tradition heavy with references to particular crops, animals or social relations tells you what mattered. And they reflect the views of whoever was in a position to have their sayings remembered, which in most societies was not everyone.

A great many traditional proverbs express views about women, about outsiders, about social rank and about children that are not shared by contemporary speakers of the same languages. Treating a proverb collection as a description of what a culture believes now is a mistake; treating it as a record of what was sayable at some point is more defensible.

Are they dying

Proverb use appears to have declined in some contexts and it has certainly not disappeared.

What has changed is the source. Advertising slogans, film lines, song lyrics and internet formulations circulate in exactly the way proverbs do — fixed wording, memorable rhythm, deployed to make a point about a situation.

Whether these count as proverbs is a definitional question of limited interest. The function is being performed by something, which suggests the need is durable even when the specific inventory turns over.

And the older ones persist unevenly. Most speakers of any language know a stock of proverbs, use a smaller number, and could not explain the imagery in several of them — which is a reasonably good description of how tradition usually survives.