Vol. 5 No. 2 · 3 February 1983
pages 13-14 | 4106 words
Short is sweet
Christopher Ricks
- The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs edited by J.A. Simpson
Oxford, 256 pp, £7.95, October 1982, ISBN 0 19 866131 2
- A World of Proverbs by Patricia Houghton
Blandford, 152 pp, £5.95, September 1981, ISBN 0 7137 1114 0
The alphabet does happy things. The first entry in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs is able to give unforced priority to some of the most important properties of proverbs. ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ First, that it is more recent than you think (c.1850). Second, that nobody has ever heard of the talented person who endowed it with the anonymity of genius (T.H. Bayly). Third, that – divinely wise – it sprang full-grown from its creator’s head; perfect, just like that. Fourth, that it evokes what for some is the glory of proverbs and is their ignominy for others. The Observer in 1923 waxed: ‘These saws are constantly cutting one another’s throats. How can you reconcile the statement that “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” with “Out of sight, out of mind”?’ Later in the book, there appears another of the newspaper’s rhetorical questions: ‘What is the use of saying that “Many hands make light work” when the same copy-book tells you that “Too many cooks spoil the broth”?’
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Letters
Vol. 5 No. 7 · 21 April 1983
From Paula Neuss
SIR: I was delighted to learn from Christopher Ricks’s piece (LRB, Vol. 5, No 2) that the proverb isn’t going out of fashion. But is it changing its style? Earlier proverbs use alliteration, repetition and/or rhyme – as part of their wit, making for the easy memorability that must have helped them become proverbs in the first place (‘time will tell’; ‘first come, first served’; ‘measure is treasure’). Some contain two or three of these devices (‘waste not, warn not’; ‘what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’; ‘fine feathers make fine birds’). This might have had something to do with the way English poetry was originally composed (though how many proverbs are there in Beowulf?) or with the style of proverbs’ Latin ancestors (praemonitus, praemunitus), and it certainly explains how the inaccuracy deplored in ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ and ‘many a mickle makes a muckle’ came about. Some of the new proverbs appear to be in this tradition (‘garbage in, garbage out’; ‘the family that prays together, stays together’), but generally it seems that the wit of modern proverbs lies less in the sound than in a new visual element. One does not imagine geese and ganders side by side with bowls of sauce, but ‘the opera isn’t over till the fat lady sings’ and ‘if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys’ encapsulate complete (albeit imaginary) dramas, as does Ricks’s candidate from Randall Jarrell – ‘You can’t break eggs without making an omelette. That’s what they tell the eggs’ – and one of my own from Raymond Chandler: ‘It was just too awful for words. Words didn’t think so. Words were just sitting around, waiting to be said.’ But are these ‘really’ proverbs? Time will tell.
Paula Neuss
Birkbeck College, University of London
