Life – a user's manual Part II - Boksidan

Nowadays I rarely hear someone use proverbs. This could mean that the practice has declined. Though it is
difficult to know, because it would require a comparison of randomly selected conversations from then and
now. Which is impossible. The voluminous collection of proverbs presented in the annex, told of as few as
two people, however, indicates that this is the case. Because I doubt that it is at all possible to find someone
in Sweden today, which can count up even half as many proverbs.
A small interview study 2 (see table 2 in the Swedish version of this book) indicates that only about one-fifth
of the proverbs in the annex is widely known today, one third are completely unknown and moreover twothirds
of them are not used.
Some proverbs, as below, vindicated those who didn’t do something about their situation and mocked those
who tried. Such proverbs might fit better in the old days, when it was even more difficult than it is today to
change environment and living conditions 3 .
No. 18 in the Annex: Anyone who can do everything is a bungler in it all.
No. 52: You have to learn to crawl before you can walk.
No. 53: Do not fly higher than the wings can take you.
No. 267: Anyone who want to climb high often fall down.
No. 359: One should not flutter before flying.
No. 454: You know what you have, not what you get.
No. 539: Lucky in games and unlucky in love.
No. 544: The one that can not not, can something else.
No. 654: Shoemaker stay with your shoes.
While today we rather praise those who do the contrary to the spirit of these proverbs. These are called class
travelers, visionaries, entrepreneurs and other positively charged epithets.
2.
Seven persons (2 women and 5 men aged 36-47 years, mean age 42 years, living in Stockholm) were asked if they
had heard or used a sample from the Annex. The sample consisted of every 20 proverb, except if my interpretation
of the dialectal text was too vague or too lacking in rhythm. Then, the next proverb is chosen instead. And when it
had the same problem I chosed the 19 th proverb.
3.
Among other things, because there were fewer jobs to choose from, since the professional choices of the majority
of the population, only stood between different forms of natural resource use. Since just over 100 years ago,
agriculture employed about half of the working population according to the Central Statistical Office’s Yearbook
1901(SCB 1901). Nowadays, however, it is not more than about 1% is engaged in agriculture (SCB 2005).
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