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My response
In every movie, I have ever watched, I've heard and seen at least one proverb and that makes me feel that it's the way of American people say things to encourage themselves or friends and family. But in this article, there's a sentence that made me recount my idea "For a native speaker, the worst thing about a proverb is probably its overuse. For everyone who finds comfort in saying like “Everything happens for a reason” and “God only gives you what you can handle,” there’s someone else who finds such sayings maddening." Maybe people use proverbs just because their habits?
Somehow, I don't see many Thai people use proverbs at all in Thailand. Since I was little we didn't proverb anything but we do have them in the Thai language though. For me, I don't use them because no one uses it to me before and I find that Thai proverbs are not as classic as English proverbs and it's an old- fashion, I mean real old fasion and the words are too hard to bear in mind. I remembered when I was in junior school I had proverbs exams and I failed because those words weren't used in real life and how would I remember that?. However, I respect my language and I think it's a good idea to preserve them for future generations.The proverb that always pops up in my mind is "Nothing ventured, nothing gained". I knew it from my favorite song of Hugo called "Wake alone", it was at the beginning of the song. The meaning of this proverb is that "you can't expect to achieve anything if you never take any risks." I believe it's true as I see a lot of successful people have had taken risks and became successful but I still wonder Would everyone can be successful? But still, I believe we have to start before thinking of the end.
What is your favorite proverb? Share your thoughts!
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Reference
I like Anya's topic and the ideas that come in her response. I rather liked the phrase "the worst thing", although the examples given made me think of something much worse than mere overuse.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what others think of Anya's response with thoughtful questions to respond to.
Thai proverbs are a mystery. Because I'm studying Chinese with elders. From time to time they brought up Thai proverbs in the class and I got stunned. I have heard of those proverbs but I don't really know what the meaning of them. When they want me to translate these proverbs into Chinese I have to let them interpret those proverbs first. I think not using proverb's frequency varies from one language to another language. Formality of their usage also varies from one to another.
ReplyDeleteMy initial response, which I had hoped someone would say for me, is that I don't agree with Mark Peters that "Proverbs express a common truth or practical knowledge."
ReplyDeleteI agree with the idea that proverbs are useful vagaries for lazy writers, and perhaps lazy speakers, but they are often false and worse.
For example, if I hear someone say “Everything happens for a reason,” I have trouble staying calm. The healthy response to this seems to me to be that it is either a lie or perfectly trivial. If the speaker means everything is caused, then that's so obviously true it's not worth saying: water falls because it's caused to by the laws of physics, and those same laws cause us to say and think everything we do. In this sense of “Everything happens for a reason,” it's true, but so obviously true it seems a waste of breath to say it.
If something more substantial is meant by the proverb “Everything happens for a reason,” then it is false. Most things that happen do not happen for any sort of intentional reason - they are just largely accidents resulting from the physics of the universe. The little boy did not starve to death in Africa because his suffering and death served any intended reason, and it seems to me morally ugly to say it did. That children are dying in agony every day cannot and should be dismissed with some pretty little proverb that “Everything happens for a reason." We don't need to add these lies to ugliness happening. And it's dishonest to pretend that there is some reason that makes such horrific suffering OK. It isn't OK.
Proverbs about gods also tend to upset my calm. If there were any gods, the daily evidence for the past few thousand years, or billions of years, shows them to be monstrously bad managers, downright evil, in fact.
DeleteBut I like the Greek gods of Homer and his Western descendants. The family mob from Olympus are cool!
DeleteI guess over the last hour or so, as I prepared for class tomorrow and had a meal, Anya's topic kept turning over in my mind. There are some proverbs that I like, the ones that make up the entire Book of Proverbs in the Judeo-christian Bible. These contain some great writing, having been worked on probably for generations before being written down in a standard text. The modern ones from self-help books seem to me sickly in comparison.
DeleteThe link is to the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible, which is a very scholarly translation that reads well in modern English. My personal preference for reading the Bible in English is the old King James Version (KJV), but the wonderful language there, around the same time Shakespeare was writing, is challenging for modern readers, and unfortunately it isn't always as accurate. As wiht most things, academics today know a lot more about the original languages and ideas in the Bible than was possible 400 years ago.