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Mind your language

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From: The Spectator
Date: 19970517
Author:Wordsworth, Dot

IF, as is unkindly said, cliche is the poetry of the people, then proverbs are their rule of life, and a singularly undemanding one. No smoke without fire would condemn Dreyfus, Charity begins at home send Rwandan refugees to their deaths. The fact is that most proverbs are blunt instruments.

It was in an attempt to shock people out of their proverbial complacency that post-Renaissance epigrammatists like Balthasar Gracian (1601-58) tried to compose new saws. Leave them hungry, he wrote, referring not to refugees but to preachers' audiences, who ought not to be bored into satiety. It is a ...

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