Modern Proverbs Appeal

[Charles Doyle]

Fred (in a posting subsequent to the one below) is certainly right to suggest that the sentence from Maslow could have passed from print into oral tradition as a proverb. Such a process occurs commonly--with literary sayings, scriptural snippets, and notable sentences from other kinds of written sources (often those get somewhat MISQUOTED as they become folklore: "Discretion is the better part of valor," "Pride goes before a fall," etc.). If they retain a specifically bookish or high-brow (as opposed to popular) character, they are called aphorisms or sententiae (or "quotations"!), not proverbs.

Though without any great diligence is searaching for early datings, the _Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs_ (2003) rightly, I think, identifies as proverbial "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," with quotations from 1981, 1989, and 2002.

The sentence from Maslow is dated 1966. An prior analog, if not a source, is what's sometimes referred to as "The Law of the Hammer" or "Kaplan's Law of the Hammer"--though Abraham Kaplan himself, in 1964, called it "the law of the instrument": "Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding" (_The Conduct of Inquiry_, p. 28). Evidently, Kaplan was not (and did not claim to be) the formulator of the "law"; a year earlier (1963), this had appeared in an paper by Kenneth Mark Colby: "The First Law of the Instrument states that if you give a boy a hammer, he suddenly finds that everything needs pounding" ("Computer Simuilation of a Neurotic Process," in _Computer Simulation of Personality_, ed. Silvan Tompkins and Samuel Messick, p. 178; the editors' preface is dated 1962).

In 1912 this appeared: "Give a child a hammer and he will pound everything"; John Wirt Dinsmore, _The Training of Children: A Book for Young Teachers_ (p. 88).

That's as far back as I can go (at present)!

--Charlie
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---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 14:11:05 -0400
>From: Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
>Subject: Re: Modern Proverbs Appeal (UNCLASSIFIED)


>According to the staggeringly informative Yale Book of Quotations, the quotation is the following:
>
>It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
>        Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance ch. 2 (1966)
>
>Fred Shapiro

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