Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article “A Proverb Each Day Keeps This Scholar at Play” by Richard Wolkomir (©1992 by Smithsonian Institution).

Ever since emigrating to the United States from Germany at age 16, Wolfgang Mieder has left no proverbial stone unturned. Besides teaching about proverbs at the University of Vermont, he has published more than 50 books on his favorite subject, including the massive Oxford University Press Dictionary of American Proverbs.

Mieder can tell you the origin of the proverb “One picture is worth a thousand words." Its structure, he says, is one of the universal types: "One of something is worth vast numbers of something else." He can spin off examples, such as "One good head is better than a hundred strong hands" (English), "A friend is better than a thousand silver pieces" (Greek), “A moment is worth a thousand gold pieces"( Korean), "A single penny fairly got is worth a thousand that are not" (German), and “Silence is worth a thousand pieces of silver" (Burmese).

The structure of “One picture is worth a thousand words" may derive from a familiar type, but the actual proverb was dreamed up in 1921 by Fred R. Barnard of the Street Railways Advertising Company. He used it in a piece he wrote for an advertising journal, advocating pictures in advertisements.

“One picture" hit on something about how the mind works—at least, the American mind in the nascent media age—and became part of the national psychic genome. That is one way to look at proverbs: as bits of mental DNA passed on from generation to generation. Some persist, others mutate and evolve. Some disappear. But proverbs are slippery things, and defining them precisely has eluded proverb scholars, or paroemiologists.

“Proverbs are crystallized bits of wisdom," says Mieder, adding that they average seven words, tend to have several levels of meaning and apply to various situations. That is why they are not necessarily true. If “Absence makes the heart grow fonder," why do we say “Out of sight, out of mind"? And if “He who hesitates is lost," how come you have to “Look before you leap"? Mix and match, says Mieder. “We pick the proverb that fits the situation." He has his own favorite definition: “A proverb is a concise statement of an apparent truth that has currency."

Folklorists note that proverbs' meanings depend on the situations in which they are used. And many proverbs do not fit our changed society. A city youth who has never met a Rhode Island Red chicken might have trouble deciphering “Never cackle unless you lay." Nationality also can affect interpretations. The Scots, for instance, tend to read. "A rolling stone gathers no moss" as extolling the virtues of action as opposed to the more sedentary life. The English, however, tend to equate it with the beautiful growth of moss on a stone in a stream, a metaphor for tradition and stability.

These examples suggest that proverbs reveal “national character." But paroemiologists following that road have hit a dead end. "I could put together a bunch of proverbs that show Americans are materialistic, and I could put together another collection showing that Americans really value friendship and love," says Mieder. “If I know the 300 most common American proverbs, the ones we really use, then maybe I can say something."

In fact, that is one of Mieder's projects although aimed at a different goal than determining national character. The idea of establishing a country's "proverbial minimum" began in Russia in the 1970s, when scholars identified about 300 proverbs that every Russian knows. In the former Soviet Union, people of many nationalities often found themselves struggling to learn Russian, a proverb-rich language, and mastering the proverbial minimum was vital. Now efforts are under way to establish proverbial minimums for other nations, too.

Mieder is pushing the project in the United States: “I've already done statistical analyses, figuring out which proverbs are particularly frequent in 20th-century U.S. writing." Mieder cautions, however, "we would have to distribute about 10,000 questionnaires around the United States to see what proverbs people actually use." Establishing a U.S. proverbial minimum will ease the path for immigrants learning English, he adds.

Meanwhile, linguists are taking a whack at the world's millions of extant proverbs, trying to reduce them to a small number of basic structures. On one level, they reduce proverbs to simple formulas, like “Where there's X, ihere's Y.” But on a deeper level, where they use symbolic logic, their results are pages full of pluses, minuses, equal signs and does-not-equal signs.