Download Free Cassell Dictionary Of Proverbs Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Cassell Dictionary Of Proverbs and write the review.

Collects more than 1,400 English-language proverbs that arose in the 20th and 21st centuries, organized alphabetically by key words and including information on date of origin, history and meaning.
From our earliest years we have heard proverbs, and many of them are repeated without much thought. Yes, ‘birds of a feather flock together’ and ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’, but these sayings are so familiar that we are scarcely aware they are proverbs. It has been so for thousands of years, in every culture. It is only when someone like Max Cryer takes the time to look at them that we can see how these ‘pearls of wisdom’ have played such a key role in the moral guidance of every society. Sometimes the wisdom is distinctly odd, sometimes it has become outdated, and sometimes it is simply contradictory. After all, do ‘many hands make light work’ or do ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’? You can’t really have it both ways.In 'Preposterous Proverbs', Max Cryer looks at a vast array of proverbs from around the world. Proverbs on birth, food, women and love rub shoulders with others on money, animals, sin and death. He has chosen some of the most interesting and perplexing, and with his characteristic wry wit he analyses their meaning and truth. A great book to dip into, 'Preposterous Proverbs' will take you from Greece (‘A thousand men cannot undress a naked man’) and China (‘A dry finger cannot pick up salt’) to Japan (‘Fools and scissors must be carefully handled’) and India (‘A fat spouse is a quilt for the winter’).
"This book presents a composite picture of the richness of proverbs as significant expressions of folk wisdom as is manifest from their appearance in art, culture, folklore, history, literature, and the mass media. The book draws attention to the fact that proverbs as metaphorical signs continue to play an important role in oral and written communication. Proverbs as so-called monumenta humana are omnipresent in all facets of life, and while they are neither sacrosanct nor saccharine, they usually offer much common sense or wisdom based on recurrent experiences and observations."--BOOK JACKET.
Lists the meaning and origin of more than 1,700 traditional and contemporary English proverbs.
The thirteen chapters of this book comprise an intriguing and informative entry into the world of proverb scholarship, illustrating that proverbs have always been and continue to be wisdom's international currency. The first section of the book focuses on the field of paremiology (proverb studies) in general, the spread of Anglo-American proverbs in Europe, and the phenomenon of modern proverbs. The second section analyzes the use of proverbs in the world of politics, including a chapter on President Obama, while the third concentrates on the uses of proverbs in literature. The final section ends with detailed cultural studies of the origin, history, dissemination, use, function, and meaning of specific proverbs. Noted scholar Wolfgang Mieder shows that proverbs matter in culture, literature, and politics. Proverbs remain part and parcel of oral and written communication, and, he demonstrates, they deserve to be studied from a range of viewpoints. While various chapters deal with a variety of issues and approaches, they cohere through a rhetorical perspective that looks at the text, texture, and context of proverbs as speech acts that make a noteworthy impact on culture and society. Whether proverbs appear in everyday speech, on the radio, on television, in films, on the pages of newspapers or magazines, in advertisements, in literary works, or in political speeches, they serve as formulaic verbal devices to add authoritative weight through tradition, convention, and wisdom.
Presents a collection of five thousand proverbs from a variety of cultures throughout history.
This book examines how proverbs can carry ethnonyms and contradictory oppositions in everyday speech, and interrogates the belief that such nuances are national in nature by comparing across languages and cultures. The authors bring together linguistic terms and typologies from Slavonic, Germanic, Romance, Finno-Ugric and Somali proverbs (with their English parallels) to enrich contrastive paremiology. The book pushes the thematic boundaries of the paremiological minima of languages by drawing on fields including sociolinguistics, and it will be of interest to students and scholars of cultural linguistics, comparative cultural studies, sociolinguistics, social identity, anthropology, cognitive semiotics, and the history of words and concepts.
“A powerful and timely addition to the literature of rhetoric and folklore.” —Choice In 1860, Abraham Lincoln employed the proverb Right makes might—opposite of the more aggressive Might makes right—in his famed Cooper Union address. While Lincoln did not originate the proverb, his use of it in this critical speech indicates that the fourteenth century phrase had taken on new ethical and democratic connotations in the nineteenth century. In this collection, famed scholar of proverbs Wolfgang Mieder explores the multifaceted use and function of proverbs through the history of the United States, from their early beginnings up through their use by such modern-day politicians as Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Bernie Sanders. Building on previous publications and unpublished research, Mieder explores sociopolitical aspects of the American worldview as expressed through the use of proverbs in politics, women’s rights, and the civil rights movement—and by looking at the use of proverbial phrases, Mieder demonstrates how one traditional phrase can take on numerous expressive roles over time, and how they continue to play a key role in our contemporary moment.