A Dictionary of American Proverbs »

Wolfgang Mieder is Chairperson of the Department of German and Russian at the University of Vermont. The late Stewart A. Kingsbury was Professor of English at Northern Michigan University. Kelsie B. Harder is Professor of English at the State University of New York, Potsdam.

A Dictionary of American Proverbs is a treasury of more than 15,000 sayings, adages, and maxims commonly used in popular speech in the United States and Canada. As the first major collection of proverbs in the English language based on oral sources rather than written sources, it includes thousands of uniquely American proverbs that have never before been recorded as well as many thousands of traditional sayings that have found their way into American speech from classical, biblical, British, continental European, and American literature.
This unparalleled collection will delight the general reader as well as the specialist. Collected here are nuggets of popular wisdom on all aspects of American life: weather, agriculture, geography, travel, money, business, food, neighbors, friends, manners, government, politics, law, health, education, religion, music, song, and dance.
Field work on the Dictionary was conducted over thirty years under the direction of the Committee on Proverbial Sayings of the American Dialect Society and resulted in 15,000 records of proverbial texts which have been edited for this collection. The result is an invaluable reference for general readers and students, as well as cultural historians, folklorists, linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars of literature.

Library Journal

This scholarly work lists U.S. and Canadian proverbs alphabetically by key word, cross-referencing for related proverbs. Although it draws strictly from oral sources, noting the recorded distribution, the book also lists each proverb's first citation in writing along with its inclusion in other collections. Especially valuable are the variants: ``Absence makes the heart grow fonder'' also has ``Absence makes the heart wander'' and five other versions. Understandably, large sections are devoted to ``man,'' ``money,'' and ``woman.'' This is an excellent, well-conceived document of a fast-changing and perhaps dying segment of our language. Recommended for reference sections.--Kitty Chen Dean, Nassau Coll., Garden City, N.Y.