Phraseology and Culture in English

5. Currency and newness 
Even for an expert paremiologist like Whiting, and even more for the 
largely untrained contributors to the American Dialect Society’s project, it 
takes time for the consciousness to register a new expression as proverbial 
and thus for it to be “collectable” from oral or written sources. So the prov-
erbs that one period – including our own – has recognized as such nearly 
always entered traditional lore in an earlier period. 
As a sort of experiment, a few years ago, I tested that aspect of “cur-
rency” in a dictionary that explicitly prided itself on the abundance of “new” 
proverbs it contained (Doyle 1996 and 2001). The dust jacket of the Con-
cise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (Simpson 1982) proclaimed, “Every ma-
jor proverb in use in the twentieth century, old or new, is included” (major
being, I suppose, a wiggle-word in such a preposterous claim for a concise
dictionary!). Yet the dictionary contained only 21 sayings for which it 
gave, as the earliest dating, the twentieth century. The second edition of the 
Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (Simpson 1992) made equally lofty 
claims for the inclusion of new proverbs, a “general history of all proverbs 
in common use in Britain in the twentieth century” (Simpson 1992: ix); 
however, it added to the 21 in the first edition only 11 proverbs that were 
(according to the earliest dates cited) new in the twentieth century – and 
just one newer than the newest entered in the 1982 edition. The third edi-
tion (Simpson and Speake 1998), according to the Oxford University Press’s 
online catalog, was “updated to include every major proverb in use in the 
twentieth century.” Now exactly 12 “new,” twentieth-century proverbs had 
been added to those in the earlier editions. With no great effort, I listed 
some 200 additional proverbs that had likely been coined in the twentieth 
century, or expressions that became current as proverbs in that century. 

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Charles Clay Doyle 
Even the perceived “newness” or recency of coinage of proverbs can be 
illusory, an artifact of the incomplete information available in proverb dic-
tionaries. “’Tis new to thee,” as Shakespeare’s Prospero muttered to Miranda. 
Perhaps the case is simply that no compiler previously thought to enter the 
proverb. The antedating of expressions as they are recorded in proverb dic-
tionaries is often easy. 
Whatever the “data base” used for a compilation of proverbs, then, the 
problem of currency obtains. Like all dictionaries, proverb dictionaries are 
out-of-date at the moment of their publication. Fixed data bases, obviously, 
contain only sayings that were proverbial in a past time. Once collections of 
proverbs proliferated in print, each relying on its predecessors, there began 
to emerge something like a canon of proverbs in the English language. An 
expression is certified as proverbial by its inclusion in a published collec-
tion of proverbs, which recognizes an expression as proverbial by its hav-
ing been including in still earlier collections of proverbs. New proverbs 
need not apply for entry! 
A corollary aspect of the problem of currency in proverb dictionaries is 
ascertaining just when the expressions were common in oral tradition, and 
among what groups of speakers. After all, a saying that was once proverbial 
may disappear from oral tradition – in which case it has ceased to be a 
proverb. Or, an expression that is proverbial among one group of speakers 
may have no currency in the oral traditions of other groups. Unlike regular 
dictionaries – which routinely label individual words as “obsolete,” “ar-
chaic,” “rare,” or in some other way limited as to their historical, geographi-
cal, or social distribution – proverb dictionaries tend to imply that once an 
expression is designated a proverb, it remains proverbial forever – and that 
a proverb belonging to any group of English speakers is a proverb of the 
English language at large, as if English speakers constitute a folkgroup. 
For compilers of proverbs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
whose aim was (in effect) to widen students’ repertory of sayings for rhe-
torical and argumentative use, the distinction was not so important. Even an 
unknown proverb (therefore, in a sense, not a proverb at all) could serve a 
writer’s or an orator’s purposes. 
Despite the implied assumption of many later proverb dictionaries that 
proverbs entered in early published collections must have been current at 
the time the compilation was published, no claim of currency was regularly 
made by the early compilers themselves. Take, for example, Thomas Fuller’s 
Gnomologia (1732) which was subtitled Adagies and Proverbs; Wise Sen-
tences and Witty Sayings, Ancient and Modern, Foreign and British: Of the 

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Collections of proverbs and proverb dictionaries
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6496 proverbs listed – without glosses or annotations – all we can really 
know, finally, is that, at least in one compiler’s mind, a given expression 
was proverbial – or had been proverbial in some country, language, and 
era. Fuller himself confessed, “all that I take upon me here to do, is only to 
throw together a vast confus’d heap of unsorted Things, old and new, which 
you may pick over and make use of.” Yet later scholars persist in citing Fuller 
as evidence that given proverbs were current in 1732. 
John Ray was aware of the matter of currency; he gave, as the first of 
several categories of sayings in his collection, some 500 “Sentences and 
Phrases found in the former Collections of Proverbs, the most of them not 
now in common use for such, so far as I know.” However, as with his ad-
vanced method of alphabetizing, Ray’s recognition of proverbial obsoles-
cence was largely ignored by other collectors.