Most of us know and use proverbs. Some of us drop them into conversation every day, and others only once in a while. They ...

Bert O. States, professor of dramatic arts emeritus at the University of California at Santa Barbara, guides readers through the mythical land of “Proverbia,” where bits of received wisdom are both ...

There’s a reference book called the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, which is how I know that it was some five-and-a-half centuries ago that a book first declared, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” ...