p.B. J. Whiting savors proverbial expressions and has devoted much of his lifetime to studying and collecting them; no one knows more about British and American proverbs than he. The present volume, based upon writings in British North America from the earliest settlements to approximately 1820, complements his and Archer Taylor's Dictionary of American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1820-1880. It differs from that work and from other standard collections, however, in that its sources are primarily not "literary" but instead workaday writings - letters, diaries, histories, travel books, political pamphlets, and the like. The authors represent a wide cross-section of the populace, from scholars and statesmen to farmers, shopkeepers, sailors, and hunters. Mr. Whiting has combed all the obvious sources and hundreds of out-of-the-way publications of local journals and historical societies. This body of material, "because it covers territory that has not been extracted and compiled in a scholarly way before, can justly be said to be the most valuable of all those that Whiting has brought together," according to Albert B. Friedman. "What makes the work important is Whiting's authority: a proverb or proverbial phrase is what BJW thinks is a proverb or proverbial phrase. There is no objective operative definition of any value, no divining rod; his tact, 'feel, ' experience, determine what's the real thing and what is spurious."

Excerpt from English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases That popular phraseology which has subsisted among us time out of mind, and which may be said to constitute a kind of common speech, presents to our notice a theme peculiarly abounding in curiosity, interest and social illustration. The Rev. John Ward, Vicar of stratford-on-avon in the time of Charles II., observes in his diary Six things required to a proverb; 1. Short; 2. Plain; 3. Common; 4. Figurative; 5. Ancient; 6. True. If we allow this to be a fair criterion or standard, it follows that in the existing collections are a very great number of articles which have no real title to a place there; and such is, indeed, the actual fact. In Dr. Fuller's Gnomologia, 1732, there are 6496 sayings; but of these a considerable proportion would have to be eliminated to satisfy Mr. Ward's postulates; for there are, assuredly, many which do not fall under any of those heads. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.