Phraseology and Culture in English

Penny Lee
tionally a concern for makers of proverb dictionaries and one on which 
judgments are difficult to make. Apart from the difficulties involved in col-
lecting proverbs that are fundamentally part of oral traditions and often not 
found in written form, an expurgatory tendency on moral grounds has also 
ensured that true representativeness is not achieved in most collections in-
tended for a general readership. Doyle concludes his paper with a number 
of “gendered proverbs” current among students he is in contact with, some 
of which would not find their way into dictionaries. He suggests that some 
denigrative women’s sayings about men reflect social changes in recent dec-
ades, including greater independence and choice for women. They also, of 
course, in the projective sense mentioned above, help to promote and sus-
tain attitudes that support these changes by providing catchy and therefore 
memorable formulations of values and attitudes that might be used interpre-
tively to make sense of relationships and events. Men’s sayings similarly 
offer guidance in the form of maxims or precepts about how to think about 
women. Although Doyle points out that these gendered proverbs often sati-
rize traditional formulations, and that even the most confronting from the 
point of view of the maligned gender may be shared as quips or jokes, we 
would do well to give them more serious personal attention in many cases. 
Perhaps consciousness can intervene in the entrenchment process to some 
degree when we actively choose a different expression in preference to one 
that comes more quickly to mind. I say this in the belief that every expo-
sure to a form, whether heard, thought, read, spoken or written, has reinforc-
ing power in terms of its weighting in the internal linguistic system (Hockett 
1987; Lee 1996). Well-entrenched linguistic patterns participate in uncon-
scious as well as conscious processes of linguistic thinking and there is no 
guarantee that the unconscious mind, sifting and shuffling formulaic strings, 
differentiates in the way the conscious mind might want to do between 
irony and disrespect. 
After all, as Wolfgang Mieder reminds us in the opening paragraphs of 
his paper, proverbs reflect cultural scripts (although he does not use this term) 
and may represent, to some degree at least, “the social and moral value sys-
tem or the worldview of those who use them”. He agrees that to calculate to 
what degree this is so, one would need to do a more comprehensive study 
of the culture than of its proverbs alone. Nevertheless, as “cultural signs”, 
they do repay careful study, as his survey of the “Yankee wisdom” embod-
ied in New England proverbs demonstrates. They can function overtly and 
authoritatively (as well as subversively) to guide behaviour and orientate 
people in socially sanctioned ways as they face life’s challenges. The value 

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Formulaic language in cultural perspective
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of historical depth in a study of this kind is clear. Benjamin Franklin’s eight-
eenth century promotion of proverbs as repositories of generations of wis-
dom is argued to have played an important role in developing attitudes to 
the world that are recognized as typical of New England folk. In the nine-
teenth century Ralph Waldo Emerson also reflected extensively on the na-
ture and role of proverbs in human life, using them copiously himself in his 
writings and building on Franklin’s contribution. Although many of the prov-
erbs discussed in Mieder’s paper are widely found in the Unites States, a 
significant core are not widely known, according to Mieder, although fre-
quently heard in New England. These have to do with ingenuity and com-
mon sense, independence and perseverance, thrift and economy, the value of 
silence, attitudes to work, friends, enemies, money and fate, etc. They inter-
mesh effectively to constitute what might well be regarded as evidence of a 
“worldview” marked by reserve and careful and serious management of 
human affairs. 
A starkly different picture of a culture’s typical patterns of response to 
daily experience is presented by Pam Peters in her paper on similes and 
other evaluative idioms in Australian English. Like the proverbs discussed 
above, the wealth of formulaic structures she discusses are shown to index 
a values framework that gives the society in which it is current (and indi-
viduals within that society) culturally acceptable ways of understanding and 
engaging with life’s ups and downs. Unlike the reticent seriousness of Mie-
der’s New Englanders, however, Peters’s Australians use an extensive stock 
of often comic conventionalized similes and evaluative grammatical frames 
to make light of life’s challenges and to ruthlessly (or slyly) undercut all 
kinds of pretence. Australians, it seems, not only draw on a cultural script 
that, traditionally at least, gives weekends iconic status, but also another 
that elevates word play, alliteration and rhythmic and structural properties 
characteristic of oral poetry to a colloquial art form. This script guides evalua-
tion of behaviour and helps people cope with the more oppressive impinge-
ments of life’s contingencies. 
The paper is a model of systematic exploration of the kind of prefabri-
cated structures that Peters examines. She lists her sources in detail, draws 
profitably on relevant historical material, tracks changes and variations in 
meaning, extracts, describes and analyses recurrent themes that emerge 
from the data, analyses the structures of open grammatical frames, and iden-
tifies rhetorical and literary devices that contribute to the effectiveness and 
memorability of the idioms treated. A useful advance organizer helps the 
reader anticipate and negotiate the structure of the report, while a synthesis 

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