A Little Book About Sharing Big Ideas Succinctly What do the following statements have in common? Slow and steady wins the race (Aesop, ~550 BC) Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today (Chaucer, late 1300s) Stupid is as stupid does (Gump, 1994) They're all proverbs--the ultimate long-stories short that convey more meaning than the words used to construct them. They're universally human, independent of time, culture, and language. They're policies for making better life decisions, passed from the experienced to the inexperienced. And while it's tempting to dismiss them as droll or trite, doing so just underestimates the roles they play in both human understanding and teaching. The Proverb Effect is the first book to define a repeatable process to convey deep meaning through self-created proverbs. Read it to learn: Why proverbs reign supreme over other message types What makes proverbs the triple-threat of communications: memorable, repeatable and most importantly, persuasive A step-by-step methodology to apply the most powerful communications device in human history. The best writers, speakers, and teachers use proverbs. You should too.

Attracting renewed attention by a new generation of scholars, the book presents a comprehensive ethnography of proverb communication in an African culture and achieves a significant breakthrough in proverb studies. The author critically reviews the dynamics of the proverb, one verbal genre that embodies the high point of rhetoric in traditional and contemporary Africa, and explores in rich details the proverb's creative potential, authorship and effectiveness in crisis management. Yankah elevates the documentation of the African proverb beyond decontextualized compilations, and portrays the proverb as a dynamic communicative strategy in which form, meaning and logic are in constant flux. The study, which focuses on the Akan of Ghana, situates the proverb in the heart of real life discourse interactions and monitors its rhetorical efficacy on the basis of indigenous aesthetics. The book should be of value to folklorists, sociolinguists, anthropologists, literary scholars and students of African studies and communications.

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, and pragmatics 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.

"Walter Gibson, dean of Bruegel scholars, has done it again. His new book, like the proverbs it studies, instructs gently yet plainly in compact size. While it figures forth the depths of Bruegel's own passion for proverbs, this wide-ranging period study also shows the cultural breadth of Dutch proverbs in other media, including the witty world of urban rhetoricians. These 'loquacious pictures' have their adept translator in Walter Gibson."--Larry Silver, author of Peasant Scenes and Landscapes "This is an important book for anyone interested in the representation of the verbal in Northern Renaissance art, and Gibson, who has long conveyed the latest research into Netherlandish iconography to the English-speaking world, an authoritative guide to this neglected aspect of the intellectual climate of the period. Here is new light illuminating some of the lesser-known works of Bosch and Bruegel, but also those of much less well-known artists who chose to pictorialise the idiom in an era--as this study triumphantly demonstrates--in which the proverb came into its own and the verbal became visual not just in manuscripts and paintings but in the very market-place."--Malcolm Jones, author of The Secret Middle Ages

Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa. This revised edition makes Finnegan's ground-breaking research available to the next generation of scholars. It includes a new introduction, additional images and an updated bibliography, as well as its original chapters on poetry, prose, "drum language" and drama, and an overview of the social, linguistic and historical background of oral literature in Africa. This book is the first volume in the World Oral Literature Series, an ongoing collaboration between OBP and World Oral Literature Project. A free online archive of recordings and photographs that Finnegan made during her fieldwork in the late 1960s is hosted by the World Oral Literature Project (http: //www.oralliterature.org/collections/rfinnegan001.html) and can also be accessed from publisher's website.