Although most people would have little difficulty in quoting a proverb if asked, the matter of precisely defining a proverb is much more problematic. The Oxford Dictionary's offering of a 'short pithy saying in general use' is neither sufficiently comprehensive nor accurate.
Proverbs need not be 'in general use', and 'short pithy sayings' is ill-defined to the point of being meaningless. Archie Taylor's 1931 definition of a proverb extended to over 200 pages, and concluded that it was impossible to give a meaningful definition that was also brief.
Part of the difficulty with defining proverbs is that they do not conform to a neatly categorised genre. Their form, origins, content, purpose, structure, application, and a range of other aspects are so varied as to sometimes give the impression that there is no such single entity as a proverb. In some cases, a proverb can be something as basic as a moralising generalisation, while at the other end of the scale, it can be a complex and extremely culture-bound metaphor, conforming to an intricate structure, and containing several layers of encoded meaning.
Paul Moon in Traditional Maori Proverbs: Some General Themes
published in Deep South v.3 n.1 Autumn 1997
http://www.otago.ac.nz/DeepSouth/vol3no1/moon2.html
Copyright (c) 1997 by Paul Moon, Auckland Institute of Technology.
Proverbs need not be 'in general use', and 'short pithy sayings' is ill-defined to the point of being meaningless. Archie Taylor's 1931 definition of a proverb extended to over 200 pages, and concluded that it was impossible to give a meaningful definition that was also brief.
Part of the difficulty with defining proverbs is that they do not conform to a neatly categorised genre. Their form, origins, content, purpose, structure, application, and a range of other aspects are so varied as to sometimes give the impression that there is no such single entity as a proverb. In some cases, a proverb can be something as basic as a moralising generalisation, while at the other end of the scale, it can be a complex and extremely culture-bound metaphor, conforming to an intricate structure, and containing several layers of encoded meaning.
Paul Moon in Traditional Maori Proverbs: Some General Themes
published in Deep South v.3 n.1 Autumn 1997
http://www.otago.ac.nz/DeepSouth/vol3no1/moon2.html
Copyright (c) 1997 by Paul Moon, Auckland Institute of Technology.
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