My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol.3, #44, May 4, 1998

ROSES BY A DIFFERENT NAME

A student once asked me why proverbs were all old---weren't we coming up with any new ones? Now, that was kind of a stumper. Are we really not producing anonymous folk wisdom anymore?

I thought about that quite a while until I realized, well, duh, of COURSE we're still coming up with proverbs. We just don't call them that--we call them bumper stickers, or put them on T-shirts these days.

Now, Charles M. Schulz says "There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker," but, with all due respect, I suggest that kind of depends on the bumper sticker. "Stuff happens" (my preferred version) is a philosophy and an attitude combined. It says "This is how the world is, so deal with it." Compare it to the Yiddish proverb, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him what your plans are," or to another bumper sticker: "Life--it's nothing like the brochure."

There are certain bits of wisdom about the way the world works that seem universal, as common to Russian and Belgian proverbs as to American tag lines, as true in the middle ages as they are now. Where Italian folk wisdom says "One lives with little and dies with nothing," we say "Life's a bitch and then you die."

In the face of a hard and unforgiving world, proverbs traditionally encourage kindness. The Roumanians say, "Do good and throw it on the road." We have turned "senseless beauty and random acts of kindness" into a national campaign and perhaps, for some of us, a way of life.

Folk wisdom has always been on the side of making the best of whatever you have. Our current version is a bumper sticker urging us to "Bloom where you are planted." Many proverbs tell us not to be stuffy or take ourselves too seriously. As the Montenegrins have it, "God preserve me from anyone too sober." The version for my son's generation is, "Don't sweat the small stuff. Corollary: everything is small stuff."

We may be particularly outraged now about the buying, or at least renting, of our politicians, but we are hardly the first to notice that money and power generally manage to live in sin. The Swedes say, "One hand full of money is stronger than two full of truth," and the Russians, "When money speaks, the truth keeps silent."

So what do we do then with the people whose bumper stickers proclaim "He who dies with the most toys wins"? We make fun of them, that's what we do. You know that commercial where a rich old guy in a limousine opens his window and asks the man in the adjoining limousine if he happens to have any Grey Poupon mustard? There's a bumper sticker now that says "Pardon me, do you have any cheap yellow mustard?" It's not that we don't enjoy owning things ourselves, but most of us have the native shrewdness to realize, as the Yiddish proverb has it, that "with one rear end, you can't be at two circuses."

You might question whether bumper stickers and T-shirts are strictly speaking folk wisdom. Didn't somebody write this stuff? But I'm inclined to think that most proverbs and tag lines were "written," or at least the work of some individual genius who took a commonplace idea and gave it unusually good form. We simply forgot who that person was. After all, attribution seems to be the first thing that goes in our memories--we remember the joke, but forget whether it came from Leno or Letterman.

If you teach Shakespeare to high school students, you always have at least one kid who says, "Why is he all the time using cliches?" And you have to tell them that Shakespeare invented those cliches, that he was the first one who said "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." (Which is probably true, though I doubt Robbie Burns would have gotten very far with "My luv's like a red, red stinkweed.")

I suspect that much of our modern folk wisdom began as tag lines in movies and TV and songs and cartoon strips. Look at these tag lines. Some of them have achieved proverb status, while the others are proto-proverbs, the only thing standing between them and proverbhood being widespread adoption:

ALF: "Find out what you don't do well, then don't do it."

MASH: "The meek may inherit the earth, but it's the grumpy who get promoted."

Flintstones: "It takes a smart man to know he's stupid."

Linus, in Peanuts: "I'm living in a stacked deck."

Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

John Lennon: "Life is what happens to you when you're making other plans."

Zorba the Greek: "Take what you want and pay for it, says God."

So my answer to that student, who has long since disappeared, is that we ARE still generating proverbs. What are proverbs, after all, but small pieces of usable truth, big ideas in tiny packages, whose authors have fallen victim to our collective bad memory.