A good joke can lift the lowest spirits, enliven the dullest party, or be a welcome icebreaker at the start of a speech. But why is it so hard to find that key quip when you need it? Now anyone can have the best jokes at their fingertips with this comprehensive collection of the finest, funniest, most up-to-date gags, rib-ticklers, and silly one-liners ever. Organized by subject and containing side-splitters stolen from such wits as Groucho Marx, Orson Welles, Mark Twain, and P. J. O'Rourke, among many, many others, this volume assures those who use it that they will never again be at a loss for words that produce giggles galore.

This book examines stereotypical traits of women as they are reflected in Anglo-American anti-proverbs, also known as proverb transformations, deliberate proverb innovations, alterations, parodies, variations, wisecracks, fractured proverbs, and proverb mutations. Through these sayings and witticisms the author delineates the image of women that these anti-proverbs reflect, her qualities, attributes and behavior. The book begins with an analysis of how women’s role in the family, their sexuality and traditional occupations are presented in proverbs, and presents an overview of the genre of the anti-proverb. The author then analyses how this image of women is transformed in anti-proverbs, sometimes subverting, but often reinforcing the sexist bias of the original. This engaging work will appeal to students and scholars of humour studies, paremiology, gender studies, cultural studies, folklore and sociolinguistics alike.

This book is the first comparative study of English, German, French, Russian and Hungarian anti-proverbs based on well-known proverbs. Proverbs are by no means fossilized texts but are adaptable to different times and changed values. While anti-proverbs can be considered as variants of older proverbs, they can also become new proverbs reflecting a more modern worldview. Anti-proverbs are therefore a lingo-cultural phenomenon that deserves the attention of cultural and literary historians, folklorists, linguists, and general readers interested in language and wordplay.

This book explores various aspects of marriage and the ways it is viewed and conceptualized in the body of Anglo-American anti-proverbs (or proverb transformations). It also depicts those who contribute to the institution of marriage (that is, husbands and wives), and analyses their nature, qualities, attributes and behaviours as revealed through such anti-proverbs. In addition, the text investigates those who remain single and do not belong to the institution of marriage, but contribute to the institution of marriage. It will appeal to a wide range of readers, from the casually interested general reader to the paremiologist, paremiographer, lexicographer, and anthropologist.

With more than one hundred-fifty books and three hundred published articles on proverb studies that have attracted wide attention of folklorists around the world, it is little wonder that international scholars look upon Wolfgang Mieder as the modern-day Pied Piper of paremiology. For this festschrift, some of the world's leading proverb and folklore scholars have come together to commemorate Mieder's sixty-fifth birthday. Authors from Russia, Eastern and Western Europe, Israel, and the United States have contributed essays representative of the scope and breadth of Mieder's own impressive scholarship. The Proverbial «Pied Piper» honors Wolfgang Mieder's legendary contributions to the study of proverbs and contains new scholarship by some of the best paremiologists in the world.

The volume presents an innovative set of researches featuring theoretical and practical discussions of the proverb in cognition and culture. To date, there seems to be a need for state-of-the-art research into this subject matter. This volume aims at responding to this need. The chapters contribute, from a Cognitive Linguistics interdisciplinary perspective, to the existing body of literature on the proverb. The book begins with a first part containing three chapters concerned with theoretical discussions of proverbs in cognition and culture. The three chapters in the second part ponder proverbs within a cognitive-cross-cultural perspective. The third part of the volume includes three chapters that deal with the proverbs of individual languages and cultures. The three chapters in the fourth part study proverbs and/or related phenomena from a cognitive and cultural perspective: snowclones, idioms, and proverbial phrases. This book will be of interest to academics interested in proverbs within a cognitive linguistic framework and to scholars in the areas of language studies, applied linguistics, language teaching and learning, and Cognitive Linguistics in general, and to those researchers who wish to refine their knowledge about the cognitive activities featuring proverb use and their interaction with sociocultural contextual variables.

Yearbook of international proverb scholarship.