• From a loving person criticism is good; from others even kisses are dangerous.

• The wise value advice and correction, the foolish resent them.

• A gentle answer turns away anger, a harsh one asks for it.

• What a man thinks is what he really is.

With so many New Year’s resolutions already abandoned, perhaps some proverbial wisdom is in order. When we reflect on the common sense that proverbs put so succinctly we are the better for it. Forewarned is forearmed.

A minor poet, James Naylor, wrote among his ‘Vagrant Verses’:

King David and King Solomon

Led merry, merry lives With many, many lady friends

And many, many wives. But when old age crept upon

them With many, many qualms,

King Solomon wrote the

Proverbs And King David wrote the

Psalms.

Scholars know that David and Solomon were neither the ideal king nor the paragon of wisdom that some have claimed for them. There is a tradition that David had musical ability but his authorship of only half of the 150 psalms is shown by close parallels to the others in Egyptian, Babylonian and Assyrian literature. That, of course, does not lessen their value.

As to the “proverbs of Solomon”, the study of Near Eastern sources shows that there was much interaction between the wise men of Judah, Israel, Syria and other peoples living along the trade routes. None of it detracts from the practical wisdom or ethical education content of the proverbs they have left to us. The Hebrew words that become “fool” in English translation denote a person whose moral quality is deficient. “Wisdom” is right thinking and behaviour.

“Happy is the man who gains wisdom; she is more profitable than silver and has greater value than gold. Her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace”. Solomon, or whoever, knew that “understanding” was not synonymous with either “education” or “training”. That is a good thought with which to begin a new school semester.

The collection and study of proverbs is called paremiology (Greek paroimia = proverb ). A proverb is closely related to an adage, a generally known saying such as “Where there’s smoke there’s fire”. It is also akin to a maxim , a bit of behavioural advice like “Honesty is the best policy”.

Was my old professor, Rheinhod Niebuhr, indulging in an aphorism or an epigram when he said “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary”? Our language has a variety of words to express ‘insight’ in pithy phrases. ‘Proverb’ applies more precisely to a statement that merits more than usual consideration.

Consider the following:

• The silence of a fool can be mistaken for wisdom.

• When a man pretends to be good he is at his worst.

• Sick persons should not make physicians their heirs.

Professor Wolfgang Mieder of the University of Vermont is currently the best known scholar of proverbs. He defines them as “short, memorisable folk wisdom handed down from generation to generation”. They can contradict one another. “Out of sight, out of mind”: does not sit comfortably with “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”. As with scriptural quotations, one’s life experience can evoke variant interpretations.

There are also anti-proverbs that have been dubbed ‘perverbs’. They alter the meaning of well known sayings. Prof. Mieder offers this example: “Nerds of a feather flock together”.

Paremiologists say that most of us know about 300 proverbs. That is the “paremiological average”. The meaning of some of them is fading, e.g. “Cobbler, stick to your last”. How many youngsters know what a cobbler is. With unaccustomed grammatical correctness one of them might ask, “To his last what should he stick?”

There is a surprisingly extensive bibliography on proverbs and their various styles. There are the alliterative kind (“Forgive and forget”), those that use parallelism (“Nothing ventured nothing gained”), the rhyming ones (“When the cat’s away the mice will play”) and the elliptical ones [ellipsis = the omission of words] such as “Once bitten twice shy”.

Speech ‘bytes’ such as proverbs are used in teaching English as a second d language (ESL). One thinks of Professor Higgins’s insistence on the repetition by Eliza Doolittle of the phrase “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain”.

Although proverbs are common to all languages, some cultures are particularly rich in them. That is especially so of those native to the Atlantic coast of Europe and Africa but not of the Americas. Perhaps we here inherit ours from over the sea. Don Quixote told Sancho Panza not to “overload your speech with a glut of proverbs”. “Alas”, says Sancho, “when I talk they crowd so thick and fast into my mouth that they quarrel about which will come out first”. Let the paremiology student beware.

Little other allusion to proverbs is made in classic literature except by Leonato in “Much Ado about Nothing”. When his brother Antonio advises him at the beginning of Act V “not to patch grief with proverbs”, it is reminds us that “Time heals all wounds” is not apposite condolence. In Shakespeare’s “seven ages of man” the justice (judge) is “full of wise saws and modern instances”. A ‘saw’ is a proverbial saying. Or, is it an epigram? Whatever!

A pre-Christmas sale of casual clothing in a local mall offered some notably scabrous short sayings on the backs of T-shirts. That aisle vendor should be challenged next year. That would not be censorship of free expression; it would simply discourage unseemly vulgarity. One shirt did say cleverly, “If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you”. The rest were by and for those whom Hebrew wisdom like that of David’s or Solomon’s old age would have called “fools”.