SHIRLEY L. ARORA

A Dictionary of American Proverbs*. Ed. by Wolfgang Mieder, editor in chief;Stewart A. Kingsbury, and Kelsie B. Harder.New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. 710.

This volume represents the long-awaited culmination of the proverb collection project carried out under the auspices of the American Dialect Society, beginning in the 1940s and continuing--in its fieldwork phase--until the end of the 1970s. The result of these four decades of collecting was a mammoth assemblage of approximately 150,000 items of proverbial speech, out of which the editors have isolated some 15,000 "true proverbs" and their variants--leaving aside, perhaps for future publication, the vast numbers of proverbial phrases, proverbial comparisons, wellerisms, and other categories of folk speech noted down by diligent field workers throughout the United States and Canada. The dedication of the volume to Margaret M. Bryant, the "impetus and driving force"behind the proverb project (Dictionary, p. ix), is an appropriate recognition of her outstanding role in every phase of the operation, from the initial call for the collaboration of anyone willing to jot down and send in familiar sayings, phrases, idioms, and other elements of proverbial speech, through the years of active collection, and on into the final stages of organization and annotation of the collectanea. (Her monograph on Proverbs and How to Collect Them [Greensboro, NC: American Dialect Society, 1945], written to inform, inspire, and instruct prospective collaborators in the proverb project, is a valuable source of background information on the guidelines and procedures adopted in the collection of the materials that make up this Dictionary.) Bryant continued to chair the Committee on Proverbial Sayings until 1985, after which it remained for the editor-in-chief and his two colleagues to see the Dictionary through to its final form.

"True proverbs" are, for purposes of this collection, "concise statements of apparent truths that have common currency" (p. xii). Anyone who has worked with proverbs will recognize immediately the difficulties inherent in establishing a workable definition and consequently in delineating the contents of the volume. Of the three criteria contained in the above definition, the first two--concision and truth--work fairly well (although some of the texts, far from being genuinely concise, are surprisingly wordy); the third criterion is more problematical. Each entry was of course submitted by someone who considered it a "current" saying, but of what does "currency" really consist, and how is the degree of "currency" to be ascertained? In her instructions to prospective field workers, Bryant urged them to "send in anything you hear or find," leaving it to the members of the Committee on Proverbial Sayings to decide, on the basis of their recorded data, how widely used the sayings were. (Her advice, "If in doubt, collect" [Proverbs and How to Collect Them, p. 21], offers an amusing contradiction to the proverbial injunction "When in doubt, leave it out" [Dictionary, p. 166].) The editors of the dictionary have likewise been inclined toward "inclusion rather than exclusion" (p. xii), and there are indeed a substantial number of entries whose proverbiality--in the sense of "common currency"--seems doubtful. Their presence serves as a reminder of the elasticity of the "folk" concept of the proverb, which can range from the terseness of Money talks (p. 417) or Like father, like son (p. 201) to the expansiveness of A politician is a fellow who gives you the key to the city after he's taken everything worth having (p. 472) or It's not improbable that a man may receive more solid satisfaction from pudding while he is alive than from praise after he is dead (p. 524). If, in a good many instances, the entries seem to lack that "incommunicable quality" that, according to Archer Taylor, tells us whether a given text is proverbial or not (The Proverb [Hatboro, PA, 1962], p. 3), they have at least at some point been deemed by one or more contributors to fulfill the criteria set forth in Bryant's call for the collection of "proverbs," and that in itself is a matter of some significance.

As the introduction points out (p. xiii), the uniqueness of the Dictionary.of American Proverbs lies in its exclusive reliance on field-recorded collectanea rather than on previously published materials. There is, nevertheless, an ambiguity that the introduction does not clarify: although it is stated on the page just cited that "all the proverbs in this dictionary were collected from oral sources," the instructions given to collectors by Bryant herself (p. 23 of her monograph) made it clear that items from written sources--books, magazine articles, newspapers, etc.--were equally welcome. Contributors were exhorted to identify their sources--whether oral or printed--in precise detail; and it is conceivable, although the introduction does not say so, that in compiling their dictionary "from oral sources," the editors simply eliminated those items for which a printed source was specified. Such a procedure would be understandable, in the interests of homogeneity; but it would be helpful to know whether that was indeed the case.

The description of the dictionary contents as "American" refers, of course, to usage or presumed "currency," not origin; and "American" is to be understood as "North American," i.e., including Canada as well as the United States; although it appears that the Canadian materials are in effect limited to contributions from Ontario and Prince Edward Island. Almost all of the contiguous American states are represented (Connecticut and Idaho being the apparent exceptions), but there is no indication of the amount of collecting activity that took place in individual regions. Indeed, if there is one additional type of information that one wishes might have been included, as part of the "recorded distribution," it would be frequency data, of particular importance in the case of the innumerable entries for which only one region is indicated. Clearly, it would be helpful, in terms of assessing "currency," to know, for instance, whether "The mountains are never so far apart but the animals find one another" (to use one random example, p. 420), was contributed by a single individual from Colorado, or by several, or by an even larger number; and frequency data would be of value to readers interested in identifying the "most commonly used" proverbs as well. One presumes that such data were obtainable, given the instructions to contributors to submit each saying on a separate 3 x 5 card or slip of paper (Bryant, p. 23), and that the decision against including them in the dictionary was an editorial one, perhaps the result of pressures to limit the size of the volume. Similar concerns may have precluded the inclusion of regional information for the variants that accompany many entries, some of which differ substantially from the main entry.

Published annotations have, quite reasonably, been limited to a "basic six" that provide, in turn, a range of references to other collections or to works of literature from which to trace the history and evolution of a particular saying. Wherever possible, the earliest English occurrence and the earliest occurrence in the United States, as cited in one or another of the six sources, are noted individually for each entry, but other annotations--international, biblical, classical--are not included. Some of the early occurrences are but distantly related to the dictionary entry for which they are cited, the resemblance being one of idea rather than wording, so that the term "first citation" is somewhat misleading, e.g. Lyly's "You talke of your birth, when I knowe there is no difference of blouds in a basen" [1580] as the "first citation" of Men's skins have many colors, but human blood is always red (p. 402); but this drawback, if it can be considered that, is not a serious one, once the reader becomes aware that the term "first citation" should not be taken too literally. For those inclined to pursue further investigations, an excellent bibliography at the end of the volume includes not only a wide variety of collections--both general and regional--but also articles on specific aspects of American proverbial speech.

Although Margaret Bryant appears to have envisaged a proverb project that would embrace non-English as well as English language proverbs (cf. her instructions to contributors to note down "the language from which [the saying] originally came" [Bryant, p. 24]), the dictionary is, as one would expect, preponderantly if not exclusively representative of Anglo-American tradition. There are, to be sure, many proverbs that are international in distribution, and the six sources used in the annotations provide some information as to their history if not their worldwide currency. One wonders, however, to what extent the project participants heeded Bryant's implicit suggestion that proverbs from other languages be included. To do so would, of course, enhance the "American" nature of the collection, but it would also raise questions as to whether a given proverb is current only in the original language or whether its English translation has become established as a proverb in its own right. For example, a random perusal of the volume reveals a number of entries that lack annotations from any of the "basic six" sources but are clearly recognizable as English equivalents of well-known Spanish proverbs. Are these instances of "international" proverbs that simply do not happen to appear in the sources of annotation, or are they proverbs that have crossed over from Spanish into English, or are they merely translations supplied by contributors to the proverb project? In at least one instance the last possibility seems to be the case: "In want of bread it is well to have seniitas [sic]" has the appearance of an ad hoc translation of the Spanish "A falta de pan buenas son semitas," with the informant providing the useful information that the term semitas refers to "a biscuit-like bran preparation, eaten like crackers or bread" (p. 68). (The misspelling seniitas, repeated twice in the entry, is probably a misreading of a hand-written entry in which "mi" was mistaken for "nii"; the term in Spanish may also be spelled cemitas or acemitas.) The slight awkwardness of the English version argues against, but does not rule out, its actual currency in everyday speech. As Wolfgang Mieder has pointed out in his chapter on "Proverbs of the Immigrants" in American Proverbs: A Study of Texts and Contexts (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), pages 47-53, much remains to be investigated with regard to proverb use among the various ethnic communities in the United States and on the incorporation of non-English proverbs into English-language speech in this country.

In any undertaking of the scope of the Dictionary of American Proverbs there are problems of organization and editorial choices to be made, some governed by the need to make the collection as useful and as easy to consult as possible, others, as noted earlier, by more pragmatic concerns such as space considerations and the economics of publishing. The arrangement by keyword is certainly the preferred one for scholarly reference, and even the more casual reader, in search perhaps of a kernel of proverbial wisdom on a certain topic, e.g., "happiness," will find in all likelihood appropriate items assembled under that term, although many other equally appropriate entries are to be found scattered throughout the work under other keywords--not only those that are synonyms or near-synonyms (e.g., "content," "contentment," "joy") but also under such disparate terms as "angry," "labor," "money," or "sin." The cross-references provided at the end of many entries, while not exhaustive, are helpful in guiding the reader to sayings in which the term under which they are grouped appears but is not the keyword (e.g., "Kindness brings happiness," listed under "kindness," p. 347).

Selection of a keyword is often a judgment call, and what appears to be the appropriate choice to one collector or reader will not necessarily appear so to another. Contributors to the proverb project were asked to supply a keyword--" usually the most important noun, sometimes a verb or adjective" (Bryant, p. 23)--and inevitably there were differences of opinion, resulting in a substantial number of double entries: "Half a loaf is better than none," listed under both "half" (p. 294) and "loaf" (p. 382); "It's the little things in life that count," under "little" (p. 380) as well as "things" (p. 589); "The shortest distance between two points is a straight line," under "distance" (p. 153) and also under "line" (p. 378); and so on. In at least one instance (the last example cited) an editorial awareness of the duplication is indicated by the notation "Cf. distance," inserted--as are all editorial comments--after the abbreviation "Infm." (for "Informant," since it is also used--somewhat confusingly--to introduce the rare comments or explanations provided by the informants themselves). In some cases the duplicate entries are precisely that--word-for-word repetitions--but in a good many instances they differ with regard to the recorded distribution, or the variants noted, or the annotations provided. For example, "Don't shut the barn door after the horse is stolen," listed under "barn" (p. 38), is arguably a variant of "There's no use in closing the barn door after the horse is stolen," which is listed (with 13 variants) under "door" (p. 164); both entries have "U.S., Can." as their recorded distribution and a first English citation from "ca. 1350," but the former gives a first American citation from 1886 whereas the latter provides a reference from 1745. "A man can't be hanged for his thoughts," listed under "man" (p. 396), has a distribution record limited to California and an annotation attributing it to Benjamin Franklin; the same proverb, with exactly the same wording, appears under "thought" (p. 593) as having been recorded from Michigan, New York, and Ontario--but without any published annotation whatsoever. "It's a long lane that has no turning," listed under both "lane" (p. 359) and "long" (p. 383), has four variants in the first instance and three in the second, with only one duplication between them; but the annotations for the two entries are identical. Such occurrences are, to be sure, comparatively minor "glitches" in relation to the scope and overall quality of the dictionary; and indeed, for some purposes of consultation they are quite insignificant. From the standpoint of the use of the volume as a scholarly reference, however, they do point up the importance of checking for listings under all potential keywords, even after one listing has been located, if one wishes to be certain that all the available information has been found.

There are some things that this dictionary does not attempt to do, and indeed probably could not, by its very nature, achieve. It does not, for the most part, provide definitions or explanations, even though Bryant's instructions to prospective contributors specifically called for them. There is a provision for "informants' comments" (marked "Infm."), but such comments, though valuable when they occur, are exceedingly rare, whether because the contributors did not supply them or because space considerations dictated their omission except when deemed absolutely necessary. (Bryant advised the addition of explanatory information "if the meaning is not perfectly obvious" [p. 23], but of course what is obvious to one reader is not so to another, especially one who might not be thoroughly familiar with the English language.) What the dictionary provides, then, is in a sense the bare bones of American proverb usage: the texts and their variant wordings, a sense of their geographical distribution, and some indication of their history, plus the means to explore such aspects further. For many readers this much will suffice; and fortunately, for those wishing to flesh out their knowledge of American proverbial lore, there are two excellent supplementary sources available: Mieder's American Proverbs:A Study of Texts and Contexts, mentioned earlier (and reviewed in Proverbium 8 [1991]: 249-253), and his more recent Proverbs Are Never Out of Season (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1993), both of which can serve as ideal companion volumes to the Dictionary. As for the Dictionary itself, it stands as an exemplary and indispensable reference work, an enjoyable and revealing cross-section of American "folk wisdom," and an impressive testimony both to the vitality of traditional speech patterns and to the inventiveness that continues to characterize present-day proverbial speech. Proverb scholars throughout the world owe a debt of gratitude to its three editors, who have succeeded in bringing this mammoth undertaking to fruition, as well as to Margaret Bryant, her fellow members of the American Dialect Society, and all the anonymous field workers and informants who, over nearly half a century, worked to make this volume a reality.

*Previously published in Proverbium, 11 (1994), 307-313

Shirley L. Arora
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of California Los Angeles
CA 90024-1532

© Shirley L. Arora

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