Sayings in Mutation: Proverb Variants as Expressive Resources

Abstract

The expressive efficacy of proverbs, according to many authors, derives mainly from certain structural aspects. The parallelism by correlation, the cohesive inversion and the ellipsis of the verb are some of the resources. The repetition in use, the constancy and the popularization of proverbs are aspects generally focused by Portuguese and Brazilian paremiologists in the not so vast specialized bibliography in this area. A correlated theme, though, starts to attract the attention of scholars. Included in it, we find what some call “antiproverbs”, defined as corruptions, deformations, pastiches or quibbles that are formed under the inspiration of a sentence, largely known by a community, with an aim either humouristic or satirical, either an advertising or commercial one – sometimes both. In this paper, we prefer to call them “aloproverbs”, examining in the Brazilian context their occurrences as discursive variations, which objective is basically the same of the original ones. We believe that, lost or depleted the expressive power of the original form, the “aloproverb” sheds new light to the moral, experiential or practical content of the primitive proverb, even if sometimes under antagonic robes. In the case of ephemerality, this variation will be “just water under the bridge”; in the case of constancy, this variation is fixed as the proverb that “venit, vidit, vicit”.