HOW RELIGIOUS ARE THE MODERN ANGLO-AMERICAN PROVERBS: A LINGUOCULTURAL STUDY
University of Rousse, Bulgaria
Abstract
The aim of the present study is to examine the corpus of all the modern Anglo-American proverbs excerpted from the first edition of The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs (2012, C. C. Doyle, W. Mieder and F. Shapiro, eds.) related to religion. They are religious in three different ways: on both the denotational and connotational planes, on the connotational plane (deep-structure meaning) only, or on the denotational plane (surface-structure meaning) only; the terms deep and surface structures are to be understood not in the Chomskyan sense, but according to Zholkovskiy’s application of these concepts in paremiology. This corpus-based study yields answers to a number of questions leading to the basic aim of our enquiry: by revealing the specific type of religiosity stored in the modern Anglo-American proverbs to construct a fragment of the modern American worldview. Proverbs, these “gems of generationally tested wisdom”, to use the fitting description of the world-renowned proverb scholar Wolfgang Mieder, surprisingly continue to thrive in our modern world. Linguistic culturology (also: cultural linguistics) studies corpora of axiologically marked linguistic items/texts with a view to explicating their specific cultural semantics. Proverbs, all of which tend to be value-oriented, thus make an ideal object of investigation for scholars in this field. The analysis in the present paper is carried out with the help of a unit known as the cultureme. In our interpretation, the cultureme is the positively or negatively marked verbalized entity, or set of entities, which is stored in and conveyed by a given linguistic item, or the message of a text. The cultureme is a concretization in the idea of semiosphere, in Juri Lotman’s sense.
1. Introduction
Proverbs, these gems of generationally tested wisdom, phrased in this fashion by the leading international proverb scholar Wolfgang Mieder, surprisingly continue to thrive in our modern world. Most of these short traditional texts that are often centuries, even millennia old, can be traced back to the very beginnings of human civilisation. Today they continue to span a bridge across generations of people of the same culture and across the whole world, holding the human race together. Proverbs are the living memory of a people, its most enduring identity and a treasure trove of human wisdom. Their archaic structure, wording and content preserve in a crystallised form the experience of people sharing the same geographical environment, history, customs, beliefs, and worldview over long periods of time, while their lexical content can often serve as a clue to a way of life long forgotten. For example, few people would today be aware that the old English proverb The cobbler should stick to his last refers literally to a special implement, called ‘last’, used by shoemakers in their workshops for repairing or making shoes, although its figurative meaning − ‘People should be doing first and foremost what they are qualified for’ − is certainly more familiar (cf. Mieder 2004: xi).
The profound changes in today’s modern life make many of the old proverbs sound quaint and obsolete. So many are the older texts which have become incomprehensible to the modern reader that some fear this folk genre might well be on the verge of disappearing. But, strangely enough, instead of disappearing, it is undergoing a process of remarkable regeneration: in the USA, arguably the most highly-industrialised modern country in the world today, new proverbs are being coined on an almost daily basis, and this has been going on since the beginning of the twentieth century. These new coinages certainly exhibit some differences from the old traditional proverb, typically in verbal form, but also in the messages conveyed. Another process characterising the spread of proverbs today is the crossing of national boundaries by ever-growing numbers of ‘national’ proverbs and their subsequent rapid assimilation into other cultures, turning the common phenomenon of proverb dissemination into proverb ‘globalisation’. And because the proverb genre mirrors the mentality of large numbers of ‘ordinary’ people, these processes bear witness to some massive changes that have come to characterise present-day societies at large.
The present study deals with Anglo-American proverbs that have originated over the last one hundred years or so − since 1900, hence the descriptive term ‘modern’. The findings of the analysis of the sixty-six texts related to religion in three different ways (on the content and expression plane, on the content plane, and on the expression plane), which were excerpted from The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs (Doyle, Mieder, & Shapiro 2012), from now on the Dictionary, will be briefly presented and discussed in order for us to gain fresh insight into the prevailing popular attitudes to religion that characterise present-day American society.
Although some aspects of the Dictionary have already been addressed by Mieder (2012), Petrova (2013a, 2013b) and other scholars, neither of these studies deals specifically with the religious proverbs. The present paper aims to fill this gap.
2. Research method
From a semiotic perspective, proverbs have been defined as ‘signs of situations and relations between things’ (Permyakov 1988: 21) and ‘texts [having] sign characteristics’ (Trendafilova 2014: 8). Proverbs, as demonstrated by the major proponent of the text˂=˃meaning approach A. Zholkovskiy (1978, exhibit a surface structure and a deep structure in a sense different from that of Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar, the surface structure being the propositional meaning of the proverb sentence, and the deep structure being the proverb meaning proper. This distinction is very important, as in the figurative proverbs the latter differs entirely from the propositional meaning the proverb sentence − or, as argued by Michael Dummet (1993: 118), any other sentence in a natural language − stands for. In terms of Hjelmslev’s dichotomy, a proverb is a sign integrating an expression and a content plane, according to Peircean semiotics it is a legisign, i.e., a representamen with a specific interpretant, while in Lotman’s paradigm, a proverb is a culture text − a complex sign − a bearer of a cultureme, which is part the semiosphere (Lotman 2000: 251). Similarly, from a linguocultural perspective, the proverb is an autosemantic one-sentence precedent text (i.e., a representative, traditional, culturally significant text), embodying a certain cultureme and message, the cultureme being the positively or negatively ‘charged’ major entity commented by the proverb, and the message being the direct or implied advice involving this entity (Petrova 2002a: 337, 341−342; 2003: 235; 2010: 250−251, 253−256). It is important to stress that he cultureme and the message can only be formulated after the proper definition of the proverb has been found. That is why, in this study, in order to remove all doubt about the meanings of the proverbs texts, the definitions inferred from the illustrations in the entries in the Dictionary have been verified with the help of additional information from the Internet about their use in context, variants, counterparts in other languages, and interpretations by native speakers.
Three features of the proverb per se can be elicited from the descriptions above: 1) the signifier vs. signified dichotomy, 2) the dichotomy of overt vs. covert meaning, and 3) the cultural salience of proverbs. The first one characterises proverbs as signs, the second attests to their predominantly figurative character, and the third shows why proverbs are an object of study of ethnolinguistics, folklore studies, literary studies and linguoculturology. With ‘literal’ texts, such as the eighteenth-century American proverb Three moves are as bad as a fire, the definition coincides with the propositional meaning of the sentence and can be explicated via a paraphrase (i.e., through applying Roman Jacobson’s interlingual translation), e.g., ‘if someone moves to a new place and does that three times, this is equal to losing all of one’s possessions in a fire’. But the figurative proverbs, which because of their metaphoricity are often grouped together with other similar genres such as riddles, parables, fables, folk tales, fairy tales, myths, and so forth, need first be ‘deciphered’ in order for the definition to be obtained. Thus, the proverb The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, whose proposition can be rendered in any natural language by translating the English sentence, has indeed nothing to do with grass, gardening, or fences; it is a metaphor interpreted as follows: ‘people often see what others possess as much better than their own’.
The view of proverbs as signs of specific ethnic or national cultures is central to linguoculturology − a contemporary scholarly discipline which explores the common ground shared by linguistics and the study of culture. It originated in Russia less than two decades ago and is now a full-grown, rapidly expanding field of research, attracting large numbers of scholars with backgrounds ranging from linguistics to philology to the social sciences. Some of its major representatives include V. V. Vorobyov, Y. S. Stepanov, V. A. Maslova, V. I. Karassik, G. G. Slyshkin, S. G. Vorkachov, V. V. Krasnyh, and N. F. Alefirenko, to name just a few. To its Bulgarian proponents belong Margarita Simeonova, Moni Almalech, Roumyana Petrova, Ivo Panchev, Roussi Roussev, Emilia Nedkova, Petranka Trendafilova, Valentina Avramova, Mariana Vitanova, and others. Linguoculturology shares some common objectives and approaches with its Anglophone counterparts − anthropological linguistics and cultural linguistics (cf. Sharifian & Palmer 2007), which however follow their own entirely independent course of development. Linguoculturology breaks the myth of the ‘freedom’ of linguistic expression of homo loquens and promotes the early nineteenth-century idea of the indivisible integral of language and culture first formulated by Johann Gottfried von Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt and later developed by Franz Boas, Eduard Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Leo Weissgerber, Anna Wierzbicka and their numerous followers. Its basic tenet is that in the process of communication, people often find themselves ‘at the mercy’ of the conceptualisation underlying their native language as a specific structure of systems and a body of precedent phenomena (names, texts, events, situations). This idea has been explored systematically from diverse perspectives including that of semiotics, which is amply demonstrated in Umberto Eco’s series of studies published in the 1980s and 1990s (cf. Eco 1995: 21, 330).
Linguoculturology views the proverb system of a language as a most enduring representation of the way of life and values of the people speaking a common language, i.e., of their linguoculture. There no doubt is, and has always been, a lot of give and take among the linguocultures on this planet, including their proverb lore, but while contending that there is indeed common ground shared by all, linguoculturology argues that it does not cancel out the uniqueness of each language and the culture it embodies. As the proverb scholar Richard Honeck (1997: 35) has observed,
[…] proverbs are generated from universal human knowledge about ideals, standards, and norms, which act as reference points in evaluating events. These reference points are intuitive forms of perfection. Cultures develop idiosyncratic linguistic means of expressing the perfection. Thus, proverbs from other cultures may be hard or impossible for a nonnative to interpret, but once the cultural code is broken, the proverbs can be seen to have a species-wide significance.
It follows, then, that although from a cognitive linguistic perspective there seems to exist a common mental core underlying the proverb lore of all people, there are certain specific differences characterising the individual proverb systems and making each one unique. In this sense, we can speak of English, German, Bulgarian, Greek, Finnish etc. linguocultures, whose ‘intuitive forms of perfection’ can be described more or less fully by studying their proverb systems, where each proverb text is a generalisation (i.e., a sign) of a situation typical of this particular culture, and where the images employed point to typical aspects of the environment and everyday life of a given ethnic or national group of people. Such a view easily explains why there are no proverbs about baseball, business, or computing among the Touareg inhabitants of Sahara and no indigenous English proverbs about camels and deserts.
Linguoculturology lays special stress on the role of semantic density, i.e., the frequency of usage and the degree of semantic and cultural elaborateness of a particular linguistic item, image, concept, or theme within a corpus, a text, or a body of texts, in one or more languages. This approach has been made use of in the works of Wierzbicka (1997: 10−15), Karasik (1996: 4), Almalech (2006: 17, 176), as well as in my own work. Taking into account semantic density by regarding it as an index of cultural significance means interpreting quantity in terms of quality. In the study of proverbs, linguoculturology focuses on the semantic density of special words, structures, or images, but also on that of the proverb culturemes and messages (Petrova 1996, 1997, 2006, 2010, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c).
3. A procedure for eliciting the proverb cultureme and message
Observations show that as a concrete generalisation of human experience, each proverb focuses almost exclusively on just one entity, most often a human quality or trait, which is prersented − overtly or covertly − as positive or negative. For example, Benjamin Franklin’s proverb quoted above is a warning against moving house. Likewise, the proverb about other people’s beautiful green lawns ridicules envy, evaluating it also negatively. We can ‘label’ these basic entities with a single noun or noun phrase and a plus or a minus sign attached to it, obtaining the culturemes ‘moving to a new place (−)’ and ‘envy (−)’.
The proverb cultureme, then, can easily be brought to the surface by answering the question ‘What does this proverb affirm or criticise?’ But there is more to proverbs as cultural texts. From a pragmatic perspective, by drawing our attention to certain aspects of reality and evaluating them positively or negatively, the traditional, archetypal proverb ultimately seeks to advise people on how to behave/or how not to behave, what to accept/or what not to accept, or, in general, on what kind of persons to be/or not to be, in the context of their specific linguoculture, should they find themselves in similar situations. The explicitly or implicitly conveyed message of the proverb involving a specific cultureme summarises its moral, lesson, or advice. Examples of explicit messages are Care not for that which you can never possess and Go all the way, or don’t go at all. But if we are dealing with figurative texts, then a different question need be asked to explicate the message − ‘What does this proverb advise us to do/to be, or not to do/not to be?’. Thus, the message of You can’t have an omelette unless you break the egg, would be: ‘Be prepared to sacrifice something valuable to get something of greater value’. The wording of the message takes the form of a sentence in the imperative, hence, ‘Avoid moving house’, and ‘Do not make yourself ridiculous by envying others’.
It can now be seen that explaining a proverb by providing its definition is not sufficient for fully understanding it as a precedent (or cultural) text. Linguocultrology is equally interested in the proverb message and cultureme as its central characteristics, deriving them from its definition and situational use. Thus we have arrived at the linguocultural structure of the proverb meaning: an indivisible unity of definition, cultureme, and message. The analysis section below is based on all these components.
4. Analysis
It is on the basis of the structure proposed above that the sixty-six religion-related modern Anglo-American proverbs have been distributed into the two types − religious texts proper (types A1 and A2), and quasi-religious texts (type B), illustrated with the examples below:
A1: Only God can make a tree. Definition: ‘God alone has unique powers of creation.’ Cultureme: ‘God’s unique power to create living things (+)’. Message: ‘We should be aware of God’s unique power to create living things.’ − The word ‘God’ belongs to the semantic field of religion and so do the cultureme and message of the proverb, therefore it is religious in form and content.
A2: A criminal (murderer) (always) returns to the scene of his crime. The proverb is a modern rendition of the Biblical verse As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly (Prov. 26: 11, King James Bible). Definition: ‘A criminal (murderer) is compelled by his guilty conscience to return to the scene of his crime.’ Cultureme: ‘the guilty conscience of a criminal (–)’. Message: Detectives should go to the site of the crime and wait for the murderer, who will most probably come back compelled by his guilty conscience. − This text does not contain lexical items pertaining to religion, nevertheless it is religious on the content plane (its definition) and in terms of its cultureme and message.
B: In heaven an angel is nobody in particular. Definition: ‘One cannot stand out among many others who are equally good.’ Cultureme: ‘trying to stand out among others who are equally good (−)’. Message: Do not try to stand out among others who are equally good. − On the expression (surface) plane this proverb employs two religious images − ‘heaven’ and ‘angels’, but neither its definition, nor its message or cultureme are religious, so we define it as quasi-religious.
In the two sections below, a few examples of proverbs and their culturemes are listed.
4.1. Type A1. Religious proverbs (27)
Your arms are too short to box with God. − ‘our inability to thwart God’s will/fate/the inevitable (−)’
There are no atheists in foxholes. − ‘the helplessness of an atheist in times of danger (−)’
Courage is fear that has said its prayers. − ‘courage, strengthened by prayer (+)’
If you dance with the devil, you will get burned. − ‘associating with evildoers (−)’, ‘retribution (+)’
When all else fails, pray (try prayer). − ‘surrendering oneself to God in hard times (+)’
The family that prays together stays together. − ‘uniting one’s family in prayers (+)’
When you pray, move your feet. − ‘complementing praying with work (+)’
What goes around comes around. − ‘retribution (+)’
Let go; Let God. − ‘letting God take control (+)’
Only God can make a tree. − ‘God’s unique power to create living things (+)’
To love another person is to see the face of God. − ‘loving one’s neighbour (+)’, etc.
4.2. Type A2. Religious proverbs (2)
There are three sides to every question (argument): my side, your side, and the right side (truth, God’s side). − ‘being objective, fair, honest, and truthful (+)’
A good woman is hard to find. − ‘the intrinsic value of a good woman (−)’.
4.3. Type B. Quasi-religious proverbs (37)
No good deed goes unpunished. − ‘ingratitude (−)’
The devil is in the details. − ‘the dangers resulting from overlooking the details (−)’
Do not greet the devil till (before) you meet him. − ‘worrying about hypothetical dangers (−)’
Go to the devil for truth and to a lawyer for a lie. − ‘the lawyers’ propensity for lying (−)’
Forgive (love) your enemies, but remember (never forget) their names. − ‘not bearing one’s enemies malice, but never trusting them (+)’
You can’t put the genie back in the bottle − ‘cultivating prudence and forethought (+)’
Even God gets tired of too much hallelujah. − ‘moderation in praising (+)’
God doesn’t make land anymore. − ‘buying land (+)’
“Take what you want,” says God, “and (but) pay for it.” − ‘taking responsibility for one’s desires or ambitions (+)’
Trust (in) God, but lock your door (your car). − ‘prudence and caution (+)’
Sometimes the good you do does you no good. − ‘the uselessness of doing good for oneself (−)’
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. − ‘taking personal control of a critical situation (+)’
Pain is temporary, victory (glory, pride) is forever. – ‘stoicism and endurance in the name of a future reward (+)’, etc.
5. Discussion
In the first group of twenty-nine texts (types A1 and A2), twenty-seven (type A1) are religious in both form and content, while two (type A2) are religious only on the content plane. Their positive culturemes are twenty-one versus only ten negative culturemes. This ratio expresses a predominantly positive outlook on life and its religious aspects. The thirteen proverb themes (with semantic densities ranging from seven to one) all belong to the religious domain:
· God and his various characteristics;
· the devil;
· man’s relationship with God;
· retribution;
· praying;
· atheists, opposing God/fate, cowardice, guilty conscience, patience, objectivity, scarcity of good women, the reason behind the whole of creation − each represented by a single proverb.
But in terms of lexical content, apart from the words ‘God’, ‘devil’, ‘prayer’, ‘conscience’, and several others, many of the other key religious words − ‘angel’, ‘heaven’, ‘hell’, ‘salvation’, ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘wicked’, ‘evil’, ‘virtue’, ‘sin’, ‘holy’, ‘pure’, ‘righteous(ness)’, ‘love’, ‘forgiveness’, ‘charity’, ‘faith’, ‘church’, ‘religion’, ‘preaching’, ‘sermon’, etc. − are missing. Instead, quite a large number of these words is employed in the quasi-religious group, as shown below.
According to their key word, the thirty-seven quasi-religious proverbs (type B) are grouped as follows:
· ten with the word ‘God (Lord)’;
· three with the word ‘good’;
· two with the words ‘faith’ and ‘heaven’;
· one proverb with any of the following words (or collocations): ‘clear conscience’, ‘forgiveness’, ‘angel’, ‘hell’, ‘honesty’, ‘religion’, ‘love for one’s neighbour’, ‘pain’ (related to martyrdom)’, ‘prayer’, ‘sins’, ‘zealot’, and ‘convert’.
There are also three texts in group B employing words that pertain to un-Christian religions or cults: ‘genie’, ‘karma’, and ‘sacred cows’, which have obviously entered the Anglo-American lexicon as loan words and have now become regular lexemes.
6. Conclusion
While the group of sixty-six religion-related proverbs account for only 4.6 % of the total number of proverbs in the Dictionary − 1,422, the twenty-nine religious ones proper make up an even smaller proportion, namely, just 2%. These figures serve as an indication of the rather modest popular interest in religious matters in contemporary American culture.
In terms of the kind of religion addressed, the twenty-nine religious texts proper are centred mostly on its practical and day-to-day aspects. There are no proverbs about afterlife, God’s majestic power and perfection, or the beauty and grandeur of the divine world. The greater share of positive culturemes points to a prevailing positive outlook on life over negative feelings such as the uncertainty and fatalism typical of the old Puritan preoccupation with the depravity of human nature and the fear of hell, which characterised early American culture with its focus on Predestination. Puritan severity and sternness have been superseded by a more ‘earthly’, pragmatic, ‘sober’, and optimistic view of life. Five of the religious proverbs stand out with the peculiar beauty of their images and greatly uplifting messages: Only God can make a tree, Let go and let God, The family that prays together stays together, To love another person is to see the face of God, There is never a cross you can’t bear. They are truly inspirational. There seem to emerge two major ideas from the religious proverbs: the deserving person is bound to succeed in his (earthly) endeavours, and the individual is empowered to take full control of his own life.
In group B, the equal number of positive and negative culturemes – twenty-two for each subtype − signifies an overall balanced outlook on life. But the most peculiar quality of the quasi-religious group is the stark negativism exuded by the subgroup of sixteen texts, whose messages, listed below, reveal very deep pessimism, stemming from a disbelief in the innate goodness of humans, the existence of a Creator, or afterlife:
‘One should know that what looks like an act of clear conscience may well mask a person’s fundamentally selfish motives.’
‘One shouldn’t in the least expect one’s acts of kindness to be appreciated or reciprocated.’
‘We should expect lawyers to be greater liars than the devil, the master liar.’
‘Always be the first to strike.’
‘Do not bear your enemies malice, but watch out they do not harm you again.’ ‘If you want to succeed in the world, develop critical reasoning and a pragmatic outlook on life rather than ‘blind faith’ in a God.’
‘Be on the look out for identifying ruthless, cruel and cynical persons.’ ‘If you want to retain your inner integrity and lead a pure life, prepare to be very lonely.’ ‘Enjoy bodily pleasures.’ ‘Trust the Lord, but take personal control of critical situations.’ ‘Discard God and religion.’ ‘Enjoy an illicit love affair as long as nobody knows.’ ‘Get busy improving your present circumstances instead of foolishly hoping for an imaginary heavenly reward for your patience.’ ‘Never expect from a stupid person to improve.’
‘Beware of narrow-minded and fanatical persons.’
The words denoting religious concepts in group B do not function with their religious semantics. Instead, they are used as conceptual metaphors to convey purely secular ideas. This fact evidences once more the dynamics of the popular attitude to religion in American culture: from its dominant role in the life of the Puritan society in Early America, down to its modest, subservient role in the materialistic consumer society of today.
The last subgroup of sixteen texts (a quarter of the proverbs under study) confirms the deepening secularisation that has been working in the American linguoculture since the beginning of the 20th century. And because of the powerful role of Americanism today, the pessimistic trend seems likely to continue to spread and affect other individuals, groups, communities, and even nations on our planet.
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