Proverbs

A Dictionary of American Proverbs is a treasury of more than 15,000 sayings, adages, and maxims commonly used in popular speech in the United States and Canada. As the first major collection of proverbs in the English language based on oral sources rather than written sources, it includes thousands of uniquely American proverbs that have never before been recorded as well as many thousands of traditional sayings that have found their way into American speech from classical, biblical, British, continental European, and American literature. This unparalleled collection will delight the general reader as well as the specialist. Collected here are nuggets of popular wisdom on all aspects of American life: weather, agriculture, geography, travel, money, business, food, neighbors, friends, manners, government, politics, law, health, education, religion, music, song, and dance. Field work on the Dictionary was conducted over thirty years under the direction of the Committee on Proverbial Sayings of the American Dialect Society and resulted in 15,000 records of proverbial texts which have been edited for this collection. The result is an invaluable reference for general readers and students, as well as cultural historians, folklorists, linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars of literature.

A ground breaking study of proverbs in African-American speech from slave times to the present.

This study analyzes the role of the sentenia (proverb, maxim, adage) in the rhetorical process of invention and, particularly, Shakespeare's use of the proverb as a master theme. The plays have a characteristic structure in which the thematic statement is initiated in the early scenes and then repeated, with variations, throughout. In Hamlet, for instance, the sententia "all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity" is exemplified and concretized in scene after scene. Previous scholars have analyzed the sententia as a hallmark of style in Shakespeare's plays, but not as the controlling theme.