From "Why Nouns Slow Us Down, and Why Linguistics Might Be in a Bubble" (The New Yorker).
(The title refers to a study that found that in 9 different languages, "the speech immediately preceding a noun is three-and-a-half-per-cent slower than the speech preceding a verb. And in eight of nine languages, the speaker was about twice as likely to introduce a pause before a noun than before a verb....")
Of course, "proverb" is a word. It's just not a word that parallels "pronoun."
That article came out in 2018, before the current obsession with pronouns. These days we ask, What are your pronouns? But it would be more interesting to know: What are your proverbs?
Mine are: Nothing ventured nothing gained and Truth is stranger than fiction.
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45 comments:
"Mine are: Nothing ventured nothing gained and Truth is stranger than fiction."
And "Better than nothing is a high bar"?
We all need to improve our verb vocabulary. We use to many adverbs because we don’t know the best verb, which would obviate the need for an adverb. No need to say “walk leisurely” when stroll mean’s “walk leisurely” or mosey means “walk slowly.”
Verbs cannot sue you. Nouns can.
The reputation of the noun weightier than that of the verb. When a person/place/thing is associated with an action/state-of-being - as happens in a sentence - it is more natural to pause and give second-thought to the noun than to the verb.
Mine is, the good is the enemy of the best.
Give Henry Winkler a trout and you’ve fed him for a day; teach Henry Winkler how to jump a shark and he’ll have a metaphor he can feed off for his entire lifetime.
These days we ask, What are your pronouns?
"We" things are the lazy composing of thoughtless accounts. Write "I" or write nothing.
My favorite applies to both golf putting and sex. Never up, never in.
Normally the word right before the noun is "fucking."
The headline example exactly refutes the claim. "Did" substitutes for "drank" in exactly the way a pronoun like "she" substitutes for "Susan". Use of "did" without a contextual specific verb leads to the question. "Did what?" Such substitution isn't "cheating".
He did that.
Who did that?
Joe did that.
Joe did what?
Joe closed the pipeline, stopped drilling, emptied the reserves, canceled leases, echoed Greta's most extreme talking-points, blamed Russia, and raised gas prices.
Oh, right. So he did.
There is a certain amount of zeugma possible. Above, all the phrases (closed, echoed, stopped, blamed...) are yokes to the single subject "Joe". Shows up when the sentence is diagrammed. Zeugma works the other way too. A comic Flanders and Swann ditty:
"He had slyly inveigled her up to his flat
To view his collection of stamps;
And he said as he hastened to put out the cat
The wine, his cigar, and the lamps ..."
The burdens imposed upon the verb expression "Put out" in this case carry on for the lacking infinitive in the subsequent phrases.
Ann no doubt would have quite the amusing time diagramming such verbiage.
My preferred proverb is: "Verbing weirds language."
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25
Do not take life too seriously. After all, you are not going to get out of it alive.
"The title refers to a study that found that in 9 different languages, 'the speech immediately preceding a noun is three-and-a-half-per-cent slower than the speech preceding a verb. And in eight of nine languages, the speaker was about twice as likely to introduce a pause before a noun than before a verb....'"
Hmmm... Sounds like one of those math-free studies that are all the rage nowadays.
Three and a half percent? Quite a lot of implied precision, there. Can you discuss your normalization protocols?
What?
My proverb is "If everyone agrees with you, you're probably wrong"
Quantilla prudentia mundus regatur.
That's a good one. SloJo ought to adopt it; much better than his current motto, Cuilibet fatuo placet sua calva.
No pain, no pain.
My verbs never got to the majors. ☺️
“Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Don’t teach a man to fish… and feed yourself. He’s a grown man. And fishing’s not that hard.”
plus more from Ron Swanson
As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly
is REALLY good.
But in gilbar's opinion.. NOTHING beats Pride goes before destruction, and haughtiness before a fall.
but since every is jumping the fish, i'll had to add
Give a man a fish, feed him for a day.. Teach a man to Fly Fish, he'll never have extra cash again
I have a pair of favorites;
Look before you leap.
He who hesitates is lost.
"Wine makes men foolish, and strong drink makes men come to blows; and whoever comes into error through these is not wise." --Book of Proverbs, 20:1
"To alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems." --Homer Simpson
Pronouns aren't that hard -- or they weren't before everybody got their own -- 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, singular or plural, masculine or feminine, and they come up constantly in speech. "Proverbs" would be rarer and would confuse more than they would simplify.
The concision of some languages may be due to the fact that they don't require verbs as much as English does and don't require verbs be repeated. A well developed case system can convey some things without verbs.
Never mind maneuvers. Always go at them.
Lord Horatio Nelson
Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.
The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.
Upon reflection, it's clear that "Never up, never in" is an apothegm, not a proverb. Sorry.
All's well that ends good.
Audacity, always audacity!
Now, if only I could live by it...
My husband and I are attempting to learn Spanish (better - we could muddle through before) because we now have neighbors and good friends who are native speakers and we want to do our share of the heavy conversational lifting. What we hear from them is that English is a pain because of the verbs and verb constructions.
F'rinstance - to ask a question in Spanish, such as "Did you walk yesterday?" you can, if you wish, use exactly the same words and word order as if you were saying, "You walked yesterday": "Caminaste ayer" with a rising inflection for the question and a falling one for the statement. In English, not only do we use inflection all sorts of ways (especially if you're a millennial or younger?), but we also have to change the actual way we conjugate they verb - from "you walked" to "did you walk" - and we must include the pronoun.
They also say that overall, English is easier than Spanish because our conjugations are simpler, that aside.
rhhardin @1:01 ""We" things are the lazy composing of thoughtless accounts. Write "I" or write nothing."
Queen Elizabeth on line 1.
First you're a prevert, then you're a pervert, and finally (if you have what it takes and you stick it out) you're a pro-vert.
"Of course, "proverb" is a word. It's just not a word that parallels "pronoun."
A proverb (pro-verb) is a statement that encourages commission of a verb, thus a call to action.
A pronoun is a noun that has exceptional competence, and can noun for a living.
The above statements are true with a probability ranging from 0 to 1.
It may be that people think in clauses (The dog ran...) so that some thought is devoted to the verb before the noun is spoken.
Don't know shit on grammar but some genius just figured your RP artifice is 8-bit word in a 64-bit world. I like how hallway monitors get worked up on how it's a proxy for smarts.
Elon Musk complaints the interface is the bottleneck, hence neuralink.
No time like the present. Don't cry over spilt milk.
The only people who should call themselves "we" are monarchs, newspaper editors, and people with tapeworms.
Twain (from memory)
"You walked yesterday?"
"Yes i did"
is completely understandable in english, as is:
"walked yesterday?"
"Yes"
as is:
"walk yesterday?"
"i did"
i think it's EASIEST to communicate in English. Because English, being a Pidgin has a HUGE advantage over languages. There isn't Actually ANY right way a speaking english. Anyone that tells you different is an english teacher, and their union SAYS that they HAVE TO lie.
Broken Spanish (or French (or German)) is pretty much unintelligible to a speaker.
Broken English works just about fine (because English is ALREADY Broken*)
ALREADY Broken* How many languages is English made up of? Saxon, Celtic, Norman, French, Greek, Latin, Spanish, Mexican, Chinese, Cherokee???
For this crowd, I offer the following:
"Assume" makes an ass out of (yo)u and me.
They can always hurt you more. (Hunter S. Thompson).
No guts, no glory, no Navy Cross. (But keep in kind that over 90% of Navy Crosses are awarded posthumously.)
It's interesting that Japanese often dispenses with naming subjects---nouns, pronouns---and simply states a verb or adjective.
"Samui". Means: it's cold out, or I am cold, or it/that is cold. Context is all important.
Ditto "tabemashita": I ate. someone ate. He ate.
Yes, it's "simple", but Japanese doesn't have a reputation for being one of the world's most difficult languages for nothing.
i think it's EASIEST to communicate in English. Because English, being a Pidgin has a HUGE advantage over languages. There isn't Actually ANY right way a speaking english.
Sure, sure - there's no such thing as "correct grammar." So why diagram a sentence?
Yes. English is comprehensible when wildly ungrammatical. But to speak or write it well, you have to jump through some hoops. Fewer than Russian, more than Esperanto (I think).
i think it's EASIEST to communicate in English. Because English, being a Pidgin has a HUGE advantage
I suppose so.
Joe Biden: US President dey ‘do fine’ afta e trip as e bin dey climb enta Air Force One
20 March 2021
US president Joe Biden bin lose im balance afta im trip and almost fall as im dey climb stairs to enta Air Force One for Joint Base Andrews for Maryland.
But a lot of spoken languages cut corners and come close to sounding like a pidgin. Haitian Creole looks weirder than it is because they don't use the tricky French spelling. A Frenchman might not find it so hard to follow.
In practice I mostly use English sayings/proverbs, like "A poor workman blames his tools," or "Idle hands do the Devil's work." The only Latin proverbs I turn to (if they can be called proverbs at all) are "Ars long vita brevis" and "Sic transit gloria mundi," which are more just observations than proverbial rules for life. For Chinese phrases, I like the following:
邦有道、貧且賤焉、恥也、邦無道、富且貴焉、恥也。(When a country is well-governed, poverty and a mean condition are things to be ashamed of. When a country is ill-governed, riches and honour are things to be ashamed of.) - Analects, 泰伯
苛政猛於虎也。(Oppressive government is more terrible than tigers) - Book of Rites, 檀弓下
Both more observations than aphorisms. Some 4 character phrases might be closer to English proverbs, although the ones I know are closer to figures of speech, e.g. 一石二鳥 (kill two birds with one stone), 弱肉強食 (survival of the fittest), 一目瞭然 (immediately obvious), 自業自得 (it's your own fault), etc. I mostly know 4 character phrases via Japanese -- some or all of those might not actually come from Chinese sources, unlike, say, 八紘一宇 (unite the 8 corners of the earth) or 尊皇攘夷 (revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians). Either way, I can confidently say I almost never use them myself. I think I have used the below in this comments section before, though:
以夷制夷 (Use barbarians to control barbarians)
Useful for commenting on foreign policy, and useful elsewhere mostly by analogy.
Correction. Not all people are hung up with pronouns. I am not sure how long ago traditional binary pronoun use hit the fan but I refused to give up on traditional male pronoun use for gender neutrality which resulted in awkward sentence structures requiring the crazy use of both genders as in "he or she." So my solution was to write without using gender-specific pronouns which I found could be done. And I won because he-or-she sentences are by the board.
Now a problem arises when selfish people become disjointed when they are not called by their preferred gender pronoun, mostly new made-up pronouns that name no gender that I recognize. Yes, the new normal is being set by not-so-normal folks.
So for my not-so-proverbial proverb, I will go with the tail-end of a defiant insult: "And the horse you rode in on."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzc3Olobbp4
An Irishman explains Irish names &how the English erased those meanings…
Patience is a virtue.
The more things change- the more they stay the same: bilingually.
“The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.” ― Lewis Carroll
One more:
Robert Benchley's Law of Distinction, namely, that “There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't.”
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