TL;DR: Unfinished reflections on proverbs as common knowledge and their loss. Nothing to do with Dan Quayle.

Epistemic status: Written at Inscribe; after finishing it, I'm skeptical of my claim and think maybe TikTok and memes maybe do play a similar role today? (But I have to publish; I'll improve it later)

Proverbs were commonly^[1] heard in 2000s Spain. I won't use the word "cool", since I probably couldn't have detected coolness from inside my nerd bubble, but proverbs certainly weren't cringe. I never heard a kid mock an old person for using one.^[2] Jocks were often better than nerds at the popular^[3] children's game of replacing the second half of a proverb with "a kick to the crotch", and laughing at how it always worked^[4]. See if you can guess the originals:

Often only the first half gets said: "waking up early..." signals that you think that the listener is doomed to fail at whatever they are attempting. This does several things at once. First, it creates a passage where an LLM would assign 99% probability to the next token. Second, leaving the sentence unfinished creates tension. Third, it makes breaking expectations possible. Fourth, all of this only works because proverbs are common knowledge.

This creates a certain modulation in speech; a feeling that this part of the speech is special, like a new instrument coming in. There are other kinds of modulations, like sacred words^[5] and a phrase suddenly said that happens resemble a song's lyrics and makes people break into song.

Spanish children today know few proverbs.^[6] Spanish is also filling up with English words;^[7] one can't discuss newer technical fields without a pile of English nouns. This is not new: many English words entered the Spanish language in the early 1900s, but they became normal words.^[8] Today's Anglicisms are jarring, but the jarring itself has become routine. Jarring because they lower predictability; routine because this low predictability happens systematically, like an edgy teenager making absurd jokes: unpredictable, in a sense, and yet quite bland in another. It reminds me of hypernormalization, the state of affairs in which everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system would fall, but then "everyone knows it will fall" became the new normal for decades.

Memes and TikTok trends are certainly common knowledge among today's teenagers, but it's unclear how many are remembered a year later. Wildly creative language still exists, in stand-up and rap among many other places. But it doesn't feel like it's affecting the common language, laying down sediment, like it once did. If anything, it feels like a period of erosion.

1. ^{^}

   I once heard that Spanish and Russian are the languages with the highest number of proverbs. Today, Claude disabused me of that notion: both languages have a reputation for proverbs because they had (presumably obsessed) writers who collected thousands of them, at a time (1600s) when other cultures wouldn't think of this and/or would consider this was a waste of time. Later languages with similar enterprises have reached similar numbers, and many languages like Chinese simply haven't had this.

   But Claude taught me the interesting concept of paremiological minimum: the number of proverbs that the average speaker needs to understand an average conversation. The plausible claim is then that Spain had a particularly high paremiological minimum; that for a long time, using proverbs looked folksy rather than vulgar. Presumably because the early writers created an acquired taste for proverbs (see Don Quixote).

2. ^{^}

   There is/was a sexist meta-proverb, though, about women who know too many proverbs being annoying.

3. ^{^}

   Spanish people playing the national version of Cards against humanity here and here and here and here and here and here and here. Renowned forecasters are also men of culture.

4. ^{^}

   I never knew why this worked, and I still don't know if the "universal working" is simply tautological, because the transformation has no constraints, or if there's something else going on.

5. ^{^}

   The 1919 Divine Words has a scene of the effect of the incomprehensible Latin words of a priest on a rural crowd. Thomas Aquinas wrote about the fear that a missdeclined Latin noun would annul an absolution.

6. ^{^}

   Olga Tarnovska: Consideraciones acerca del mínimo paremiológico español; Julia Sevilla Muñoz and Mª Teresa Barbadillo: El mínimo paremiológico español.

7. ^{^}

   To be clear, I don't think the problem is Americanization. As with the rest of globalization, it's not American/English-speaking values exactly that are becoming universal: sushi has conquered the US, and football is not going to replace soccer in Spain any time soon. It's rather the unbridled optimization in every single domain of life. And optimizing for describing the world correctly and in a way that's accessible for others is great, of course! But I'm reminded of the Renaissance, when science was created mostly in Latin, and each culture kept their language and developed independent traditions. And I'm reminded of the Hindu scholars who discussed among themselves in Sanskrit, but then came home and didn't have the words to talk to their wife about knives and bowls. This situations probably felt nicer.

8. ^{^}

   So normal, in fact, that most Spanish speakers, even those who know English, don't realize they aren't classical Spanish words (líder, mítin).

9. ^{^}

   I thought of adding the obligatory quote of someone in classical times complaining about children those days, but it seems they are all fake.