The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs

What constitutes a modern proverb? That is a crucial question when evaluating this dictionary. It contains 1,400 entries which sounds impressive but many of them do not have the structure of an old‐fashioned strictly defined proverb. There seems little proverbial about phrases included here such as: Gentlemen prefer blondes, Pain is beauty, All you need is love.

The definition of modern is easy enough: appearing for the first time in the twentieth or twenty‐first centuries. The definition of proverb is more problematic. One standard view is that a proverb should contain both metaphor and a moral element, as in A...