What Is a Proverb? Compressed Advice That Contradicts Itself

The form is recognisable and its features are all in service of being remembered and repeated:

• •Brevity, usually under a dozen words, and frequently reduced further in use, since a listener who knows the saying needs only the opening
• •A fixed wording that resists paraphrase, so that changing a word is noticed as a joke or a mistake
• •Sound patterning including rhyme, alliteration and rhythmic balance, which is memory engineering rather than decoration
• •A generalising grammar, with a bare present tense and no named people, so that it applies to anyone
• •A concrete image standing for an abstract claim, so that a rolling stone and moss do the work of an argument about stability
• •Anonymous and traditional authorship, which is what separates a proverb from a quotation, since a saying with a known author stays attached to them

The folklorist Kenneth Burke described proverbs as equipment for living, and the useful analysis is about what a speaker is doing by using one. It closes an argument, because a proverb is not offered as a personal opinion but as inherited collective wisdom, which makes it awkward to contradict directly; disagreeing requires producing a competing proverb, which is exactly what the contradictory pairs are for. It softens criticism by generalising it, so that a saying about haste is less confrontational than telling someone they rushed. It teaches indirectly, which is why they cluster in child-rearing. And it signals membership, since using the sayings of a community correctly demonstrates belonging, which is why immigrant communities and second-language speakers find them one of the last things to acquire and one of the most useful to have.

Proverbs cross languages more readily than almost any other verbal form. Many European ones descend from classical sources, from the Bible or from Erasmus, whose Adagia of 1500 collected over four thousand classical sayings and put them into circulation across the continent, which is why several English proverbs are translations from Latin that people assume are native. Others appear in unrelated traditions with the same structure and different images, so that warnings about counting on an uncertain future appear across languages using whatever animal is locally relevant. Some are genuinely universal in sense and locally specific in form, and comparative collections exist listing dozens of versions of the same idea. A separate category is proverbs that travelled recently and visibly, including a number of African sayings that entered English through translated literature and speeches, of which the one about a village raising a child is the best known and the most argued over as to origin.

In several cultures proverbs occupy a far more central place than they do in modern English. In much of West Africa, proverb use is a mark of eloquence and authority, deployed in formal speech, in dispute resolution and in chiefly discourse, and Chinua Achebe's line that proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten is the most quoted statement of their function. Akan tradition attaches many to visual symbols, the adinkra designs, so that a printed cloth carries a saying. Yoruba tradition treats them as a scholarly corpus. Chinese chengyu are four-character idioms, numbering in the thousands, most referring to a historical incident or a classical story that the listener is expected to know, so that using one correctly signals education and compresses an entire anecdote into four syllables. Japanese, Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit traditions each have large formal collections. The common feature is that the saying carries authority precisely because it is not the speaker's own.

Taking the corpus as a body of practical claims produces a mixed result, and the contradictions are the reason. A tradition that contains opposing sayings has effectively encoded the fact that the right answer depends on circumstances, and provides vocabulary for both, which is more honest than a rulebook and useless as a guide for someone who does not already know which situation they are in. Several proverbs encode observations that hold up well, particularly about compound effects, about the difficulty of undoing actions and about the gap between intention and result. Others encode the prejudices of the societies that produced them, and collections are full of sayings about women, foreigners and the poor that are no longer repeated. The interesting empirical finding is that proverb comprehension is a standard neuropsychological test, since interpreting a figurative saying requires abstracting from a concrete image, and difficulty with it is associated with particular kinds of brain injury and with some psychiatric conditions, which makes a form designed for ordinary speech a clinical instrument.

A proverb is brief, fixed in wording, patterned for sound, grammatically general and anonymous, using a concrete image to make an abstract claim. Its function is rhetorical rather than legislative: it closes an argument by invoking collective authority, softens criticism by generalising it and signals membership of a community, which is why traditions happily contain a saying and its opposite. They travel between languages more readily than other verbal forms, and in West African and Chinese usage they carry considerably more formal weight than in modern English.