My father spoke in proverbs, but for many years I did not notice. Only after I completed my graduate studies in folklore and began teaching, did I become aware of the idioms in his conversation. Without being a religious person he interlaced his anecdotes and narratives with proverbs, biblical verses, and parables from the talmuds. I began to pay attention. A few years later, when I visited my ...

Peng and Nisbett (1999) claimed that members of Asian cultures show a greater preference than Euro-Americans for proverbs expressing paradox (so-called dialectical proverbs; e.g., Too humble is half proud). The present research sought to replicate this claim with the same set of stimuli used in Peng and Nisbett's Experiment 2 and a new set of dialectical and nondialectical proverbs that were sc...

Tile Sumerian proverb in the title is invoked by Julian Jaynes (1976) as he documents the laborious process of coming to consciousness. This activity is the cognitive labor that enables us to arrive at a question about the precise relationship between two types of knowledge, or ask if "rhetorical relations [are] the realizations of intentions, or should . . . be discarded as simply a misconstru...

To a chemist, the proverb “Blood is thicker than water” implies that intermolecular forces in blood are stronger those among water molecules. Water notorious nature for having strong despite low molecular mass. The proverb, of course, does not refer to chemical bonds but humanity. There other involve chemists aren’t about DNA. For instance, share bond loving field chemistry. We can even measure...