Phraseology and Culture in English

part compilation of early Scottish proverbs (1949–1951) and Morris Palmer 
Tilley for his Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and 
Seventeenth Centuries (1950) standardized the procedure that would prevail 
among American scholars: alphabetizing proverbs by their first noun – 
even if a preceding verb or modifier seems more “key.” In the absence of 
any noun, a proverb is alphabetized by its first finite verb or (lacking one) 
by the first important word. Taylor and Whiting’s dictionary of nineteenth-
century American proverbs (1958) followed that procedure, as did Whit-
ing’s collections of medieval proverbs (1968), early American proverbs 
(1977), and modern proverbs, British and American (1989). The third edi-
tion of the Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, redone by F. P. Wilson 
(1970), alphabetized by an intuitively-determined first important word, with 
numerous cross-references from other significant words and citations of a 
proverb’s corresponding entry in Tilley’s collection. (Specialized dictionar-
ies have extensively compiled English and American proverbs from every 
historical period, with the conspicuous exception of eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century England.) 
In a sense, to call such collections of proverbs “dictionaries” is a mis-
nomer, since few of them give “definitions” or explanations beyond what a 
user of the book can infer from the illustrative quotations. The early collec-
tions that merely listed sayings with no quotations or any other explana-
tions are even less informative. A single sequence of words can have great 
variability in meaning. Once educated English speakers forgot their Latin, 
the ancient “Ars longa, vita brevis” – with its proverbial English translation 
“Art is long, but life is short” – stopped meaning “It takes many years to 
master one’s craft, yet the time left in which to practice it is short” and 
came to be understood, rather, as meaning “Art [in the sense of artistic 
creations, like a Grecian urn] can last virtually forever, while individual 
lifetimes are brief and fleeting.” The bellicose American slogan from Cold 

---

192
Charles Clay Doyle 
War times, “Better dead than red,” once its occasion and motivation passed 
out of memory, was still uttered but now by children taunting red-haired 
playmates. Not just over time but even synchronically the situation obtains. 
To cite a well-known example: whether a “rolling stone” is to be com-
mended or reproved for gathering “no moss” (depending on what tradition 
the speaker of the proverb follows – Scottish or English). Or, is someone 
who utters the proverb “Time flies” having fun – or about to die? The Ox-
ford Dictionary of English Proverbs often does include brief explanations, 
as do the three (expanding) editions of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of 
Proverbs (Simpson 1982; Simpson 1992; Simpson and Speake 1998), which 
culminated in the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (called the fourth edition; 
Speake 2003).