Proverbs, catchwords, and formulae

Let us now go back to the major grouping referred to earlier as 'set sentences'. Proverbs form an interesting category, as many have undergone structural changes over the past half-century, while many have virtually disappeared from our vocabularies. Anyone searching the British National Corpus for the proverbs man proposes, but God disposes or one man's meat is another man's poison, for example, will be disappointed. There is no record of either occurring even once in a body of 100 million words. Interestingly, even among those proverbs that do survive, there are many with living heads but chopped-off tails, such as too many cooks, a stitch in time, bolt the stable door. From full sentences they have been reduced to phrases or clauses. Now, it is true that when these truncated forms are used, the unspoken ending is in most cases also implied, as here: too many cooks spoil the broth and a stitch in time saves nine. The part that survives conveys the meaning of the whole. Nevertheless, it seems that complete proverbs are less and less often used, perhaps as a reflection of our unwillingness to take seriously such encapsulations of folk wisdom, or to recognize them as guides to personal conduct.

Catchphrases claim our interest because of the way they come into existence and, in many cases, subsequently take on fresh uses and forms. They commonly originate with a popular entertainer or public figure (when they fulfil much the same function as a signature tune) or a character in a well-known film or television drama series. In the film Casablanca, 'Round up the usual suspects!' was an order given to police officers to arrest a number of people they had often arrested before, not because anyone believed they had committed any crime, but because the police wished to appear active and efficient. For many filmgoers it thereafter became inseparable from the cynical and corrupt police chief (Captain Renault) by whom the words were first spoken and the catchphrase was coined. The meaning of the original expression has broadened, so that it can now refer to the persistent targeting of a wide variety of people or things (as in the following quotation), and not simply helpless refugees:

(1) Excise duties are taxes on specific goods, with cigarettes, booze, and petrol being the usual suspects to be rounded up on Budget Day.

I suggested earlier that the spread of sentence-length items extended well beyond the traditional categories of proverbs, catchphrases, and slogans. Among this wider and less familiar range of set sentences is one without which spoken and written communication would be less smooth and coherent. The term speech formula or 'gambit' is used to refer to these invaluable items. Speech formulae are expressions, typically spanning a whole sentence or clause, that are used to convey a speaker's assessment of other participants and their messages, and generally to ease the flow of discourse. Examples include I beg your pardon, Are you with me?, You know what I mean?, and call it what you like.

What are the distinguishing features of these speech formulae? All four examples can occur as separate sentences (I beg your pardon?, You know what I mean?, and so on) and all are used to perform some kind of 'act' with language. Saying I beg your pardon, for example, may (it has more than one meaning) be a response to something just said by another speaker; specifically, it can function as a request for clarification, as here:

(2) 'We're in trouble if it won't fit in.' 'I beg your pardon, if it won't fit in what?'

Whether the speech formulae appear on their own or not, they typically form part of a verbal interaction. And incidentally, it is not always the case that the formula is a response to something that someone else has said or asked. They are more than likely to be interactive in some other way. Look at this example:

(3) 'Now, these firms, they'd got a certain type of lock that they produced, and it was all done with a system, you know what I mean?

Here, the formula, which is in end position, is addressed to a listener, but it aims to check that he or she has understood the meanings of a certain type of lock and a system, which are not spelt out. So the formula relates both to the hearer and to parts of the language of the speaker. In a final example, the formula if you please is not used to seek for confirmation that the speaker has been understood, but rather is signalling his or her judgement that the preceding claim is absurd or unreasonable and no doubt also that the audience is expected to agree:

(4) The parents want some say in the fate of their children and these days even the children demand to be heard, if you please.

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