Almost every language has its share of proverbs. “Too many
cooks spoil the broth”—so goes a proverb that is familiar to most
Americans. People in Iran expressed the same thought with different
words: “Two midwives will deliver a baby with a crooked head.” So do
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the Russians: “With seven nurses, the child goes blind.” The
Japanese: “Too many boatmen run the boat up the top of the
mountain.”
These lean, didactic, aphoristic statements, so varied in their
languages, seem to distill a universal wisdom. Is it possible that all
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human beings share certain feelings about life in common and thus
produce like-sounding proverbs? In the Samoan fishing culture,
which is dependent on the canoe, islanders would have no difficulty
in recognizing the kinship of the English proverb, “It never rains but it
pours”, to one of their own: “It leaks at the gunwale, it leaks in the
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keel.” An old saying of the Nandi tribe in Africa goes: “A goat’s hide
buys a goat’s hide and a gourd a gourd.” This is equivalent to the
Biblical injunction, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
They say that the best proverbs—no matter what the
language—have certain characteristics in common: they all are
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concerned about life in general and cover a vast range of human
endeavor—love and war, birth and death, sickness and health, and
work and play. But it remains a mystery why some civilizations are
rich in proverbs and others are not.
Our trip to New York was a nightmare. It was very cold there and
we did not bring enough clothes. No sooner __1__ the hotel than it
started to rain. We wanted to go shopping, but hardly __2__ that there
were so many people in the streets. Finally, we decided to travel
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around the city by taking the subway. However, not only __3__ our
money in the subway, but we also got lost there. At that moment, we
really wanted to go home at once. At last, with the help of a police
officer, we went back to our hotel. When we __4__ our hotel, all we
wanted were a hot bath and a good rest.
