Limonese creole proverbs and sayings

The Power of Proverbs: Dissonance Reduction through Common Sayings

After reading a detailed account of a serious mistake in which a similar-age other went against personal values or a prior commitment, undergraduates rated their feelings of dissonance (regret, hypocrisy, and stupidity) had they been in the actor's place. Relative to a control condition, reading relevant proverbs such as "everybody makes mistakes" or "live and learn" significantly reduced feeli...

Modern Phylogenetics and Creole Evolution: Creole Family Values

Reframing and Wisdom within Proverbs

Many proverbs seem to convey wisdom because they help people to reframe life’s predicaments. Positive reframes, such as Every cloud has a silver lining, often draw positive implications from adverse circumstances (cf. “positive reappraisals,” “gain frames”). In contrast, negative reframes, such as All that glitters is not gold, provide helpful warnings about difficult situations, and therefore ...

Portuguese Proverbs: Types and Variants

Drawing on the methodology and previous results of Rassi et al. (2014) on the automatic identification of Brazilian Portuguese proverbs, this paper reports on an extension of that experiment, but now focused on the identification of the European Portuguese proverbs and their variants. Based on a large collection of over 56 thousand Portuguese proverbs and their variants, a database of proverb t...

Software Process Proverbs

The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has developed several aids to help software organizations define, manage, and improve their software processes: The IDEALSM (initiate, diagnose, establish, act, and leverage) model for process improvement, appraisal methods that include assessments for internal process improvement and evaluations to select and monitor contractors, and the Capability Matu...