Books about Proverbial from Amazon.com

In this captivating tour of humanity's received wisdom, one of Britain's best-known and best-selling authorities on language, David Crystal, brings together more than 2,000 delightful proverbs from 110 countries--the first new book of world proverbs to appear in nearly eighty years.
Here readers will find proverbs they have known all their lives--such as "Everything comes to those who wait" and "Once a crook, always as crook"--alongside such lesser known gems as "One generation plants the tree, another gets the shade" (China) or "When two elephants tussle, it's the grass that suffers" (Zanzibar). Indeed, one of the great virtues of this volume is that Crystal serves up proverbs almost certain to be unknown to the reader, providing many fresh and wonderful surprises. Readers will find shrewd and incisive sayings from virtually every continent, ranging from Finland ("Even a small star shines in the darkness") to Ethiopia ("The smaller the lizard, the greater its hope of becoming a crocodile") to Japan ("Too much courtesy is discourtesy"). Loosely following the method of Roget's Thesaurus, which groups words with similar meanings, Crystal has gathered these proverbs in 468 fields such as sameness and difference, small amount and large amount, thus placing similar and antithetical proverbs in close proximity. In addition, there are more than thirty side panels on special topics, such as proverbs in Shakespeare ("Brevity is the soul of wit"), biblical proverbs ("Pride goeth before destruction"), and much more.
Proverbs are fascinating in what they tell us about another culture's view of life. Each proverb in this book adds a tiny bit more to our understanding of the world's cultural diversity, and thus helps us grasp more fully what it means to be human.
THE WISDOM OF THE WORLD:
A coconut shell full of water is a sea to an ant (Zanzibar)
Don't call the alligator a big-mouth till you have crossed the river (Belize)
A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives you roses (China)
They dread a moth, who have been stung by a wasp (Albania)
God heals and the doctor gets the money (Belgium)
The nail suffers as much as the hole (Netherlands)
When you sweep the stairs, you start at the top (Germany)
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Price: $23.10 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Sydney Hauser's inspirational posters and greeting cards are tremendously popular among cat lovers. Sydney combines her illustrations of cats with calligraphy featuring maxims, proverbs, and messages enacted by cats. This is a charming way to keep track of the year..
Price: $9.40 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Why do people call Dr. Laura and write Dear Abby? They're looking for effective solutions to everyday problems. Yet, the Bible has an entire book--the Book of Proverbs--devoted to this. "Proverbial Wisdom & Common Sense" makes the wisdom of Proverbs accessible, understandable, and usable. It organizes the many sayings and explains their meanings in a way never done before.

It contains

- a compilation of sayings on love, money, laziness, dieting, anger, etc.
- insights from rabbinic and Messianic Jewish sources
- a ten-minute-a-day devotional plan for grasping the book and its wisdom
- practical applications for each day's topic
- New Testament references to Proverbs' principles.
Price: $7.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

SEE SHORT BLURB FOR ALTERNATE COPY... A complex, intriguing, and important verbal entity, the proverb has been the subject of a vast number of opinions, studies, and analyses To accommodate the assorted possible audiences, this volume outlines seven views of the proverb -- personal, formal, religious, literary, practical, cultural, and cognitive. Because the author's goal is to provide a scientific understanding of proverb comprehension and production, he draws largely on scholarship stemming from the formal, cultural, and cognitive views.

The only book about proverbs that is written from the standpoint of cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and experimentalism, this text provides a larger, more interdisciplinary perspective on the proverb. It also gives a theoretically more integrated approach to proverb cognition. The conceptual base theory of proverb comprehension is extended via the "cognitive ideals hypothesis" so that the theory now addresses issues regarding the creation, production, andpragmatics of proverbs. This hypothesis also has strong implications for a taxonomy of proverbs, proverb comprehension, universal vs. culture-specific aspects of proverbs, and some structural aspects of proverbs.

In general, the book extends the challenge of proverb cognition by using much of what cognitive science has to offer. In so doing, the proverb is compared to other forms of figurative language, which is then discussed within the larger rubric of intelligence and the inclination for using indirect modes of communication. Child developmental and brain substrates are also discussed.
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Price: $99.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]