What Goes Around Comes Around: The Circulation of Proverbs in Contemporary Life

In this collection of essays, prominent folklorists look at varied modern uses and contexts of proverbs and proverbial speech, some traditional and conventional, others new and unexpected. After the editors' introduction discussing the history and status of attempts to define proverbs, describing their contemporary circulation, and acknowledging the especially important work of paremiologist Wolfgang Meider, the contributions examine the continuing pervasiveness and idiomatic relevance of proverbs in modern culture

What Goes Around Comes Around: The Circulation of Proverbs in Contemporary Life

In this collection of essays, prominent folklorists look at varied modern uses and contexts of proverbs and proverbial speech, some traditional and conventional, others new and unexpected. After the editors\u27 introduction discussing the history and status of attempts to define proverbs, describing their contemporary circulation, and acknowledging the especially important work of paremiologist Wolfgang Meider, the contributions examine the continuing pervasiveness and idiomatic relevance of proverbs in modern culture.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1032/thumbnail.jp

The impact of teaching on the duration of common urological operations

Introduction: The ability of academic (teaching) hospitals to offer the same level of efficiency as non-teaching hospitals in a publicly funded healthcare system is unknown. Our objective was to compare the operative duration of general urology procedures between teaching and non-teaching hospitals. Methods: We used administrative data from the province of Ontario to conduct a retrospective cohort study of all adults who underwent a specified elective urology procedure (2002–2013). Primary outcome was duration of surgical procedure. Primary exposure was hospital type (academic or non-teaching). Negative binomial regression was used to adjust relative time estimates for age, comorbidity, obesity, anesthetic, and surgeon and hospital case volume. Results: 114 225 procedures were included (circumcision n=12 280; hydrocelectomy n=7221; open radical prostatectomy n=22 951; transurethral prostatectomy n=56 066; or mid-urethral sling n=15 707). These procedures were performed in an academic hospital in 14.8%, 13.3%, 28.6%, 17.1%, and 21.3% of cases, respectively. The mean operative duration across all procedures was higher in academic centres; the additional operative time ranged from 8.3 minutes (circumcision) to 29.2 minutes (radical prostatectomy). In adjusted analysis, patients treated in academic hospitals were still found to have procedures that were significantly longer (by 10‒21%). These results were similar in sensitivity analyses that accounted for the potential effect of more complex patients being referred to tertiary academic centres. Conclusions: Five common general urology operations take significantly longer to perform in academic hospitals. The reason for this may be due to the combined effect of teaching students and residents or due to inherent systematic inefficiencies within large academic hospitals

The Woody Guthrie Centennial Bibliography

This bibliography updates two extensive works designed to include comprehensively all significant works by and about Woody Guthrie. Richard A. Reuss published A Woody Guthrie Bibliography, 1912–1967 in 1968 and Jeffrey N. Gatten\u27s article “Woody Guthrie: A Bibliographic Update, 1968–1986” appeared in 1988. With this current article, researchers need only utilize these three bibliographies to identify all English-language items of relevance related to, or written by, Guthrie

The proverb process: Intertextuality and proverbial innovation in popular culture

Historically, scholars have tended to think of proverbs as individual items, separable from the contexts in which they appear. This has led them to believe that each proverb had a relatively simple meaning, susceptible to a literal gloss. More recently, scholars have described proverbs as inseparable from discourse contexts. This group of scholars sees proverb meaning as unknowable outside of an individual, describable context. This dissertation attempts to reconcile some of the disjunctures between these paradigms of proverb scholarship in order to better understand how proverbiality affects meaning. It chooses popular culture, a realm where proverbs may appear either contextualized or alone, as the environment in which to study proverbiality. Rather than a “textual” or “contextual” paradigm, it chooses intertextuality as a primary conceptual resource for locating and discussing proverbiality. Two theoretical chapters describe and define the proverb according to an intertextual paradigm. Three case studies then explore how proverbs, as understood intertextually, can affect the meanings of the cultural forms within which they are embedded. The case studies demonstrate that the perception of proverbiality has a profound effect on the meanings that readers find within texts. Most of the popular, political and critical interpretations of Forrest Gump, for example, use one of Gump\u27s proverbs as a structuring idea or principle. Similarly, Gary Larson\u27s The Far Side uses literalized proverbs to create a sense of ludic inversion that can directly affect the interpretation of his oeuvre. Advertisers, too, play with proverbiality, not only to persuade but also to amuse, making ads a frequently enjoyable part of our public system of verbal art. In all these ways, proverbiality—a communicated sense of vernacular wisdom—transforms our experience of popular culture. But proverbial strategy also raises important questions about the power and authority embodied by certain kinds of speech. The dissertation concludes with a consideration of the relationship between proverbial discourse and hegemony in the realm of popular culture, tying together its case studies while suggesting a direction for future scholarship

A Life in Song

Rosalie Sorrels was born in Idaho seventy-five years ago, and lives there now in a log cabin her father built thirty miles outside of Boise. She has traveled this country, usually driving herself, for half a century, and wherever she has stopped she has made lifelong friends. She began her career as a folklorist in the 1950s, and has amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of the folk idiom, ranging from the English ballads to Mormon songs to the work of contemporary songwriters. She has studied not just the songs but also the tradition from which they are derived. Her original songs and stories serve to create and preserve the oral tradition. Rosalie has recorded twenty-five albums, the most recent of which is Strangers in Another Country, a compilation of songs by Bruce "Utah" Phillips, which was nominated for a Grammy Award. She has also written three books, including Way Out in Idaho, a monumental collection of songs, stories, pictures, and recipes gathered in the course of three years spent traveling around her home state and listening to its people, and published in honor of the Idaho centenary. In this lecture, Rosalie Sorrels will offer her recollections of an eventful career as both a folklorist and a performer, and will sing songs she has collected and written over the years