This dictionary assembles 3,246 English proverbs and thousands of equivalents in five national Romance languages: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. The Dictionary is a very useful reference tool for scholars of these languages, for researchers working in various associated fields such as linguistics, literature, folklore, anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, and for workers in newer areas such as advertising and contemporary media. The Dictionary is also of benefit to diplomats and politicians who try to improve their communication by sharing ideas formulated in some common meaningful expressions; it will assist interpreters and translators, and teachers and students for whom it is important to understand not only what the target culture expresses in the same way as their own, but also what is formulated in a different way. Finally, the Dictionary will be of great interest to non-professionals who, for the sheer enjoyment of it, wish to savour the wisdom, wit, poetry and the colourful language of proverbs.

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.

Proverbs constitute a rich archive of historical, cultural, and linguistic significance that affect genres and linguistics codes. They circulate through writers, texts, and communities in a process that ultimately results in modifications in their structure and meanings. Hence, context plays a crucial role in defining proverbs as well as in determining their interpretation. Vincenzo Brusantino’s Le cento novella (1554), John Florio’s Firste Fruites (1578) and Second Frutes (1591), and Pompeo Sarnelli’s Posilecheata (1684) offer clear representations of how traditional wisdom and communal knowledge reflect the authors’ personal perspectives on society, culture, and literature. The analysis of the three authors’ proverbs through comparisons with classical, medieval, and early modern collections of maxims and sententiae provides insights on the fluidity of such expressions, and illustrates the tight relationship between proverbs and sociocultural factors. Brusantino’s proverbs introduce ethical interpretations to the one hundred novellas of Boccaccio’s The Decameron, which he rewrites in octaves of hendecasyllables. His text appeals to Counter-Reformation society and its demand for a comprehensible and immediately applicable morality. In Florio’s two bilingual manuals, proverbs fulfill a need for language education in Elizabethan England through authentic and communicative instruction. Florio manipulates the proverbs’ vocabulary and syntax to fit the context of his dialogues, best demonstrating the value of learning Italian in a foreign country. Sarnelli’s proverbs exemplify the inherent creative and expressive potentialities of the Neapolitan dialect vis-à-vis languages with a more robust literary tradition. As moral maxims, ironic assessments, or witty insertions, these proverbs characterize the Neapolitan community in which the fables take place.

This dictionary assembles 2,513 English proverbs and their Italian equivalents. Equivalent proverbs are those which express the same concept, be it literally, such as “Love is blind” = “L’amore è cieco,” or with completely different words, such as“Every cloud has a silver lining” = “Non tutto il male viene per nuocere.” The Dictionary is a very useful reference tool for scholars of the two languages, for researchers working in various associated fields such as linguistics, literature, folklore, anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, and for workers in newer areas such as advertising and contemporary media. The Dictionary is also of interest to diplomats and politicians who try to improve their communication by sharing ideas formulated in some common meaningful expressions; it will assist interpreters and translators, and teachers and students for whom it is important to understand not only what the target culture expresses in the same way as their own, but also what is formulated in a different way. The Dictionary is also of benefit to non-professionals who, for the sheer enjoyment of it, wish to savour the wisdom, wit, poetry and the colourful language of proverbs.

"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.

Travel the world with these incredibly fun cliches! Whether cliches get under your skin or make you laugh, Around the World in 80 Cliches goes the extra mile to provide an essential resource for students, teachers, writers, and anyone with a keen interest in language. Each phrase and expression comes with an explanation and place of origin. Cheeky and informative, each cliche is presented in such a way that is sure to keep you laughing through all of your adventures!

This game-changing, reader-friendly book provides a more precise definition of idioms, along with new classifications of them. It eliminates fixed phrases such as phrasal verbs, collocations, slang, and proverbs from the class of idioms, while including two major new categories: similidioms and irony-based idiom sentences (IBISes). As a matter of fact, similidioms (basically, idioms in the form of a simile) have been there probably since the beginning of our history as being capable of speaking, but they have not been revealed, until now. Starting from the observation that the production of idioms in any language is influenced by the technological advance of society, the book takes two of the most productive lexico-semantic categories of idioms in both English and Romanian—crazy and stupid idioms—and provides, for the first time, their classification according to their topic and pattern, in an intriguing contrastive approach. Well-documented and not lacking a subtle sense of humour, the book not only opens new perspectives for researchers in the field, but will also captivate the general reader interested in finding out more about the expressions they use every day.

This Dictionary assembles 2,201 English proverbs and their Spanish equivalents. Equivalent proverbs are those which express the same concept literally, such as "Love is blind" = "El amor es ciego" or with completely different words, such as "Every cloud has a silver lining" = "No hay mal que por bien no venga." The Dictionary is a very useful reference tool for scholars of the two languages, for researchers working in various associated fields such as linguistics, literature, folklore, anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, and for workers in newer areas such as advertising and contemporary media. The Dictionary is also of interest to diplomats and politicians who try to improve their communication by sharing ideas formulated in some common meaningful expressions; it will assist interpreters and translators, and teachers and students for whom it is important to understand not only what the target culture expresses in the same way as their own, but also what is formulated in a different way. The Dictionary is also of benefit to non-professionals who, for the sheer enjoyment of it, wish to savour the wisdom, wit, poetry and the colourful language of proverbs.

The Dictionary is a very useful reference tool for scholars of the two languages, for researchers working in various associated fields such as linguistics, literature, folklore, anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, and for workers in newer areas such as advertising and contemporary media. The Dictionary is also of interest to diplomats and politicians who try to improve their communication by sharing ideas formulated in some common meaningful expressions; it will assist interpreters and translators, and teachers and students for whom it is important to understand not only what the target culture expresses in the same way as their own, but also what is formulated in a different way. The Dictionary is also of benefit to non-professionals who, for the sheer enjoyment of it, wish to savour the wisdom, wit, poetry and the colourful language of proverbs. Book jacket.

Widely considered the world's greatest living proverb scholar and known as the author of, among numerous other books, the Encyclopedia of World Proverbs and the coeditor of A Dictionary of American Proverbs, Wolfgang Mieder has brought particular attention and understanding to the uses of proverbs in politics. In this new collection of eight essays, he considers the role of proverbial speech in the American political scene from the Revolutionary War to the present. Mieder introduces this survey with an examination of what characterizes American proverbs, what are their origins, and how they have spread internationally with the expansion of America's political role. He then turns to the origins and varied historical uses of what has become the defining proverb of American democracy, ""government of the people, by the people, for the people."" The employment of proverbs had no brighter exponent among the nation's founding generation than Abigail Adams, who was not without influence despite the exclusion from political office of women. As they have for so much, her abundant letters provide rich sources for politically charged proverbs. Though it is especially associated with Abraham Lincoln, ""a house divided against itself cannot stand"" is a biblical proverb that has proven of wide value as a political expression. Frederick Douglass's proverbial prowess paralleled that of his contemporary Lincoln, and he employed it effectively in his battle for civil rights. Given proverbs' enduring role in American politics, it is an interesting exercise to compare how United States presidents have employed them in their inaugural addresses, which have produced such gems as John F. Kennedy's ""ask not"" dictum. The bonds Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill formed through the World War II alliance were expressed in the proverbial language that frequently enlivened their correspondence. Having addressed these aspects of the proverb in American politics, Mieder winds up by considering the sociopolitical significance of the ambiguous proverb ""good fences make good neighbors.""