Paremiology

To avoid openly criticizing a given authority or cultural pattern, folk take recourse to proverbial expressions which voice personal tensions in a tone of generalized consent.

[clarification needed][8] Proverbs that speak to the political disgruntlement include: "When the Czar spits into the soup dish, it fairly bursts with pride"; "If the Czar be a rhymester, woe be to the poets"; and "The hen of the Czarina herself does not lay swan's eggs".

While none of these proverbs state directly, "I hate the Czar and detest my situation" (which would have been incredibly dangerous), they do get their points across.

Other times, they are used to carry more weight in a discussion, a weak person is able to enlist the tradition of the ancestors to support his position, or even to argue a legal case.

One of the most important developments in the study of proverbs (as in folklore scholarship more generally) was the shift to more ethnographic approaches in the 1960s.