We have all been targets of proverbial wisdom, particularly when we were young. A large part of the job of parenting in the old days was to bombard one’s offspring with warnings and advice in the form of easily remembered clichés posing as absolute truths. We absorbed hundreds of them, at least I did, and yet I rarely hear them these days. Have parents given up on this valuable form of character training, and abandoned their children to the moral guidance of TikTok?
It's rather sad that young people seem to have no mental stock of encouraging proverbs, as my generation did: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; It will all come out in the wash; worse things happen at sea. These tiny packages of optimism may be just what we need in a particular crisis. Every cloud has a silver lining; practice makes perfect; don't cry over spilt milk.
A lot of American proverbs are attributed to Ben Franklin or Dale Carnegie, and have an economic flavor: early to bed, early to rise; a penny saved is a penny earned; nothing succeeds like success; When fate hands you a lemon, make lemonade. You can’t argue with statements like these. Once a proverb has been uttered, it has done its deadly work. Thinking is no longer possible or allowed.
Some think that proverbs contain the distilled essence of wisdom. Wisdom comes from experience. Experience comes from making mistakes. So, proverbs are the record of numerous past mistakes, distilled to a single memorable phrase. Faint heart never won, fair lady; good fences make good neighbors. But wisdom condensed sometimes means commonsense lost. Faint Heart quite often wins fair ladies; they like a modest approach, and suburban neighbors fight over fences like street gangs defending their turf.
Some proverbs are indeed contradictory. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, but never look a gift horse in the mouth. These, I assume, refer back to the unfortunate experience of the Trojans with Greeks and horses sometime around 1,000 BC, and it isn't as clear now as it ever was. Look before you leap, but he who hesitates is lost. All these are true, and remind us that life itself is a thoroughly confusing experience that rarely makes any sense.
Few proverbs can stand up to rigorous examination. It never rains, but it pours; one swallow doesn’t make a summer; all’s well that ends well; still, waters run deep; all is fair in love and war. Some are just simple common sense. It would be foolish to cross a bridge before you come to it. Other proverbs have been made obsolete by progress. Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched makes no sense to the generation that gets its eggs from the supermarket. Now we have a space program, and it’s no longer even guaranteed that all that goes up must come down.
I could keep adding examples until the cows come home, but enough is as good as a feast. All good things must come to an end. Silence is golden.