Wisdom through Idiom

Proverbs, maxims and idiomatic expressions often mirror collective wisdom of culture it originate from, writes Annie Datta in From the Varsity.

Alexander Pope, the 18th century poet, had defined true wit as: True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd/ What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd/ Something whose truth convinced at sight we find/ That gives us back the image of our mind.

In the land of Heer (Punjab) Waris Shah used to be the most frequently quoted poet, I am told. "Waris Shah (says) habits die hard." In a rural ethos practical wisdom was conveyed through indirection. "Money does not grow on trees" one would be told. A spineless, characterless fellow would be rated equivalent to a coin of the lowest denomination. It also posited scarcity of money in circulation.

Wisdom became a rare commodity and boys would be exhorted to study to escape the fate of the ignorant parrot lolling about unaware of the tricks of the ensnarer. In other words, survival lay in acquiring skills. Generational gap is however putting us at a distance from the collective wisdom of our ancestors. It is now individuality against common sense or free play against cliché. Couplets and quatrains holding germs of wisdom are fast being forgotten.

Our horizon is now limited to knowledge of celeb culture and the goings-on in a world. Few people realise that proverbs, maxims and idiomatic expressions in general often mirror the collective wisdom, attitudes, socio-cultural practices and even the landscape from where such witty maxims originate. Take for instance references to water in wisecracking statements or epithets once in use in Punjab. According to one particular saying "Homes where tempers are frayed and reach a pitch of fever, water seeps out of the pitcher." This indicates the scarcity of water in desert like plains of north- west Punj

Another saying in north India is around trespass on one's hospitality. Guests are described forcing themselves on a reluctant host. "A guest is like rain: when he lingers on, he becomes a nuisance" (a Yiddish proverb). The nuisance of unwanted guests, however, took a philanthropic and positive turn in the legend of Hatimtai who would go to any extent to please a guest and kept his doors open to one and all.

Shortage of food or grains brought in references to watermills and windmills in Punjab. "Fortune," said Don Quixote to his squire, as soon as he had seen them, "is arranging matters for us better than we could have hoped. Look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants rise up, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes. For this is righteous warfare, and it is God's good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth."

Don Quixote is typical of the Renaissance in the way that it satirizes the chivalric traditions of the Middle Ages as absurdly old-fashioned.

In Portugal too there are proverbs around the windmill. For example: "Águas passadas não movem moinhos." (Past waters do not move mills). The old world charm of the traditional windmill is now considered heritage stuff. These quaint 'giants' are a familiar feature of Portuguese landscape even today. It is delightful to live in the neighbourhood of these.

As if wisdom is born out of the pastoral, animals also enter the world of one-liners. It's horse at one place, dog at another and parrot nearer home that are too old to learn. "Old horse doesn't learn how to walk" says a Portuguese proverb. The way "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." A variant of the parrot image is the parrot-eyed referring to a person who is a fence sitter or stays indifferent to the suffering of others. A Guatemalan proverb tells us, "It's not the fault of the parrot, but of the one who teaches him to talk". Latino proverbs on the same subject go like this: "The old parrot does not mind the stick" while another, tells us "The parrot utters one cry, the quail another".

Some proverbs convey the same standard wisdom everywhere. Like the proverb: "As paredes têm ouvidos." Meaning literally "Walls have ears". We are all too familiar of this adage. In this context small pitchers suddenly assume extra large ears.

A common proverb in Hindi warns us against lying when it says, "A lie has no feet". In Portuguese the same sense is conveyed by the proverb "Mentira tem perna curta." (A lie has short legs)

While on birds, "A crow is never the whiter forever washing" (an old American proverb). It is interpreted in a Bollywood film Hungama as: "A crow even when tumbled through a washing machine does not become a stork". Such humorous remarks twist and titillate people's common receptivity to truism. Another reference to this dissolute bird is heard yet again in another film where "a starving man throwing dinner invitation to crows" becomes an epithet mouthed by a rustic. The attack is on pretension howsoever minimal as when an emaciated person with not a morsel of food in him invites a guest. Poverty, starvation, vagabondage, though horrible in itself, was the theme that romanticized the Spanish picaresque novel. Such genre celebrated a roguish hero who lives by his wits in a corrupt society.

Wisdom through language links countries geographically apart. Three proverbs from three different countries say nearly the same thing. A Chinese proverb tells us "Love your neighbours, but don't pull down the fence." A French proverb says, "A hedge between keeps friendship green." The American poet Robert Frost concludes his poem Mending Walls with the line "Good fences make good neighbours."

All told, it seems hard to disagree with the German proverb that says: "A country can be judged by the quality of its proverbs."