Phraseology and Culture in English

6. Issues of province 
To reiterate a crucial point: Even for a proverb whose meaning can be re-
liably determined and whose currency is demonstrable at a given point in 
history, there is seldom any good way, from the early published collections 
of English proverbs – and even some later ones – to identify what folkgroups 
within a culture, language, or nation the proverb has belonged to. 
Prior to the late nineteenth century, when the folklore of individual coun-
ties of England began to be collected and published, and when American 
speech and American folklore came to be recognized as distinct from Brit-
ish, little effort was exerted to learn which English speakers knew and used 
which proverbs. The notable exception was Scottish proverbs; those, since 
the sixteenth century, had been regularly gathered into separate collections, 
most of them full of perfectly English proverbs rendered in a Scotch-looking 
dialect more colorful than believable. And the posthumous publication in 
1640 of George Herbert’s compilation titled Outlandish Proverbs did imply 
that the “outlands” of England had proverbs that were partly different from 
those encountered in London. In general, though, few collectors or com-
mentators thought of proverbs as sayings that would be used – originally, if 
not principally – only by subgroups within a culture. 
Initially, at the time of its entrance into oral tradition, every proverb be-
longs to a limited group within the amorphous populace that speaks the lan-
guage. Archer Taylor’s monograph The Proverb (1931), a cross-cultural and 
taxonomic study that blazed the trail for later investigations into the seman-

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Charles Clay Doyle 
tics and cultural functions of proverbs, made it possible – indeed, necessary – 
to think of proverbs as sentences actually being spoken under specific cir-
cumstances: performed, as a later generation of folklorists would say. The 
oral performance of a proverb takes place, first, not in the culture or nation 
but in particular subgroups having common interests, perceptions, and formu-
lations of experience. From there, a saying may migrate to different groups 
or more inclusive groups, sometimes being adopted, eventually, by a group 
comprising the majority of speakers of the language.