Short is sweet
Christopher Ricks, 3 February 1983
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs
edited by J.A. Simpson.
Oxford, 256 pp., £7.95, October 1982,0 19 866131 2 Show More
edited by J.A. Simpson.
Oxford, 256 pp., £7.95, October 1982,
A World of Proverbs
by Patricia Houghton.
Blandford, 152 pp., £5.95, September 1981,0 7137 1114 0 Show More
by Patricia Houghton.
Blandford, 152 pp., £5.95, September 1981,
“... dangerous thing,’ with the note: ‘The original learning is also used instead of knowledge.’ Patricia Houghton’s genial anthology by topics, A World of Proverbs, gives both forms, more than thirty pages apart and both unattributed. Third of the contraries, a proverb doesn’t spring complete but is rolled and rounded into its perfection of laconic ... ”