Came across the phrase 'trust, but verify' in David Warren's column this morning, where in he tells me that in Russian, it rhymes. Does it? So I checked, and it does, sort of (follow the link and click on the loudspeaker icon to hear it). Wikipedia even has a page about it wherein we find:
Suzanne Massie, an American scholar, met with Ronald Reagan many times between 1984 and 1987 while he was President of the United States. She taught him the Russian proverb doveryai, no proveryai meaning 'trust, but verify'. She advised him that "The Russians like to talk in proverbs. It would be nice of you to know a few. You are an actor – you can learn them very quickly." The proverb was adopted as a signature phrase by Reagan, who used it frequently when discussing United States relations with the Soviet Union.
The Russian language is replete with many hundreds of proverbs and sayings. . . . Vladimir Dal was a famous lexicographer of the Russian Empire whose collection was published in Russian language in the late 19th century as The Sayings and Bywords of the Russian People*, featuring more than 30,000 entries.
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| Google Doodle for Valdimir Dal |
I don't remember ever hearing about this Vladimir Dal before, but it seems Google put up a doodle of him in 2017.
We have numerous sayings / phrases we use in American English, but I don't know that any of them rise to the level of 'proverbs'. But all this reminds me of the Star Trek episode where Captain Picard ends up in personal combat with a man-sized dinosaur because nobody in their crew recognizes that the aliens speak in proverbs.
* the book, in Russian, is available from Amazon.
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