Phraseology and Culture in English

Some historical observations on what’s in them
and what’s not (with a note on current
“gendered” proverbs) 
Charles Clay Doyle 
The subspecialty of linguistics known as idiomatology or phraseology is just 
a few decades old. In contrast, the scholarly study of sentence-long expres-
sions called proverbs (or adages) has a venerable lineage, extending back 
into antiquity. Paremiology (as the study of proverbs is learnedly termed) 
has been variously regarded as a branch of rhetoric, philology, or folklore; 
only recently, thanks to the emergence of idiomatology, have linguists be-
gun taking note of such fixed superlexical locutions. As a category, prov-
erbs are difficult to define with precision; nonetheless, they have proved 
easy to identify as such, on both the scholarly and the popular levels, and 
the compiling of proverbs into books is as old as printing itself. 
1. Early modern collections 
At the beginning of the modern age, the great Erasmus of Rotterdam com-
piled his magisterial Adagia, which consisted of Greek “sayings” with Latin 
translations and counterparts, and commentaries in Latin. It first appeared 
in 1500 as a modest Adagiorum collectanea, then in ever-expanding editions, 
now titled Adagiorum chiliades, “thousands of proverbs,” from 1508 through 
Erasmus’s death in 1536. Earlier collections of sayings had appeared, in-
cluding an edition in English of The Dictes and Sayengis of the Philo-
sophhers, translated by Edward Woodville, Earl Rivers (from the French, 
from the Latin, from the Arabic and from the Greek; published by Caxton 
in 1477, probably the first book printed in England, the second ever in Eng-
lish). However, Erasmus’s Adagia was the first major endeavor that went 
beyond merely listing expressions to actually studying them – explaining 
their significations, citing and discussing variants and analogs. Some of 
Erasmus’s glosses are brief; others, though, constitute what are in effect 
“personal essays” stretching over several pages, such as his famous anti-

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Charles Clay Doyle 
war manifesto occasioned by the proverb Dulce bellum inexpertis [War is 
sweet to those who have not experienced it] and the wryly querulous dis-
cussion of his own tribulations as a proverb collector by way of comment-
ing on the expression Herculei labores [the labors of Hercules]. 
Erasmus compiled and glossed, finally, some 4,151 sayings, and all 
educated Englishmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were ac-
quainted with the Adagia. For the unschooled, translations were available, 
beginning with a condensed English rendering by Richard Taverner in 1539 
(and four subsequent editions, the later ones containing 235 proverbs with 
Taverner’s own commentaries). Even Erasmus’s infrequent errors could de-
termine the vernacular form of expressions: Pandora’s proverbial box was 
actually a jar until Erasmus mistranslated Greek “pithos” as “pyxis” rather 
than (correctly) as “dolium”; and in Greek call a spade a spade actually 
referred to a small boat or tub (“skaphê”), but Erasmus, whether by mistake 
or intentionally (perhaps influenced by his awareness of a Greek verb 
“skaptein,” [dig]), gave the Latin noun “ligo” in place of the accurate trans-
lation “scapha.” 
The first important collector of English proverbs was John Heywood, 
who left the sixteenth century’s most extensive collection of English say-
ings – some 1,800 in all. However, Heywood’s Dialogue Conteynyng […] 
Prouerbes (1546) and Epigrammes upon […] Prouerbes (1550–1562) were 
not mere compilations; nor did they include scholarly glosses of the sort 
that Erasmus lovingly presented. Instead, they were poems built largely out 
of proverbs. Heywood’s poems employ proverbs playfully, dispelling any 
notion that the sixteenth century (or any other century) treated proverbs as 
sacrosanct epitomes of wisdom and rectitude. The verses call attention to 
vagaries and complexities in the perception and application of proverbs; for 
example, this couplet, one of Heywood’s 600 epigrams: “Better one bird in 
hand, than ten in the wood: / Better for birders, but for birds not so good.” 
Neither Erasmus’s excursive method nor Heywood’s versifying typified 
what would become the main tradition in published collections of English 
proverbs. The increasingly extensive collections of vernacular proverbs that 
began to appear in print during the seventeenth century were, initially, in-
tended primarily for the use of “rhetoricians” in bolstering their arguments 
and decorating their style. 
Proverbs, by definition, are oral expressions. The effects that literacy, 
then the medium of print, may have had on the creation, dissemination, and 
application of proverbs (and other fixed sayings) are numerous and com-
plex. Here, at least, it can be noted that writing and print created what we 

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Collections of proverbs and proverb dictionaries
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may call secondary repertories of expressions – beyond those that an indi-
vidual or his circle of acquaintances commonly would have uttered and 
heard; students were explicitly encouraged to draw from an ever larger store 
of sayings. Literacy and print made possible not only the preservation but 
also the presentation of proverbs in great numbers, compiled in a form that 
could be searched visually. 
The publication of straightforward collections, with or without glosses 
accompanying the individual entries, soon demanded a consideration of how 
the entries should be arranged or sequenced for maximum utility, both for 
suggesting relationships among different expressions and for what we might 
(nowadays) call “data retrieval” – a reader’s ability to locate given proverbs 
within the collection. In Erasmus’s pioneering compilation, with its infor-
mal, often rambling commentaries on the individual entries, the adages had 
appeared in a gloriously random order. Had Erasmus’s pre-eminent goal been 
presentation in a manner that would enable readers to “look up” expressions 
about which they desired information, he might have confronted the issue 
of practical arrangement; however, a more central purpose of the Adagia
was to introduce the “modern” age to the culture and values of the ancient, 
classical world. Quite possibly Erasmus intended his book to be dipped into 
randomly, or read straight through at leisure – not a reference work but 
rather what has been called one of the world’s biggest bedside books. Eras-
mus’s purpose, though, extended far beyond the mere presentation of prov-
erbs; his readers were expected, by peering at the individual commentaries 
(and, of course, the adages themselves), to see through them as windows onto 
the long-ago time that the Renaissance humanists were giving “rebirth” to, 
and to comprehend connections between the grand past and reborn present. 
Heywood’s compilations of English proverbs, for quite different reasons, 
also failed to facilitate the ready “retrieval” of individual sayings.