adage/adij/

Adagia (adagium is the singular form and adagia is the plural) is an annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. Erasmus' collection of proverbs is "one of the most monumental ... ever assembled" (Speroni, 1964, p. 1). The first edition, titled Collectanea Adagiorum, was published in Paris in 1500, in a slim quarto of around eight hundred proverbs. By 1508, after his stay in Italy, Erasmus had expanded the collection (now called Adagiorum chiliades or "Thousands of proverbs") to over three thousand items

Commonplace examples from Adagia

Many of the adages have become commonplace in many European languages, and we owe our use of them to Erasmus. Among these in English are:

Make haste slowly One step at a time To be in the same boat To lead one by the nose A rare bird Even a child can see it To have one foot in Charon's boat (To have one foot in the grave) To walk on tiptoe One to one Out of tune A point in time I gave as bad as I got (I gave as good as I got) To call a spade a spade Hatched from the same egg Up to both ears (Up to his eyeballs) As though in a mirror Think before you start What's done cannot be undone Many parasangs ahead (Miles ahead) We cannot all do everything Many hands make light work A living corpse Where there's life, there's hope To cut to the quick Time reveals all things Golden handcuffs Crocodile tears To show the middle finger

From heaven to earth The dog is worthy of his dinner To weigh anchor To grind one's teeth Nowhere near the mark Complete the circle In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king A cough for a fart No sooner said than done Neither with bad things nor without them (Women: can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em) Between a stone and a shrine (Between a rock and a hard place) Like teaching an old man a new language (Can't teach an old dog new tricks) A necessary evil There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip To squeeze water out of a stone To leave no stone unturned Let the cobbler stick to his last (Stick to your knitting) God helps those who help themselves The grass is greener over the fence The cart before the horse Dog in the manger One swallow doesn't make a summer His heart was in his boots To sleep on it To break the ice Ship-shape

You have touched the issue with a needle-point (To have nailed it) To walk the tightrope Time tempers grief (Time heals all wounds) With a fair wind To dangle the bait To swallow the hook The bowels of the earth

To die of laughing To have an iron in the fire To look a gift horse in the mouth Neither fish nor flesh Like father, like son Not worth a snap of the fingers He blows his own trumpet To show one's heels