Idioms And Proverbs: A Philosophical Standoff

Abstract

It is to be acknowledged that the domains of idioms and proverbs in English are somewhat overlapping. There could be reasons as to why the demarcation between the two is so slender that sometimes it ends up in confusion. Idioms and proverbs have some identical qualities as they both emanate from the experiences of everyday life. They do not usually originate from mere imagination without real-life underpinnings. We find in them the individual as well as collective experience of a people fossilized in particular syntactic patterns left to grow in currency. Both idioms and proverbs have an anonymous nature—barring quotations from individuals that are sometimes treated as proverbs. They, I believe, like colloquialism, local speech form, rustic speech, and dialect forms may be treated as part of the “subaltern usage” (Hasnain 196) as against the standard language. They developed by oral tradition as it was centuries before man thought the “Experience untranscribed was experience unlived” (Keefe 128). Often they are metaphorically rich with unusual images as the use of metaphors in them aims not only to adorn the discourse with a poetic charm but also “to make the meaning simple and immediate” (Hannabuss 51). Besides this poetic flavor with figuration and even rhyming they sometimes exude a dark humor (Idioms e.g. Fall between two stools, Jump out of one’s skin, Pot calling kettle black and Proverbs e.g. Ignorance is bliss, Never insult an alligator until after you have crossed the river, The believer is happy; the doubter is wise) that serves as a sugar coat over the bitter pill of human predicament. Both these modes of expression recognize the challenges and poignancies of life and posses different attitudes toward the same. This attitudinal discrepancy that forms the basis of the philosophical standoff between the two is the focus of this paper.