Word: milners
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Nature and Culture. Most recently, the mystery has been explored by George B. Milner, a linguist at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In New Society magazine, Milner argues that laughter restores man's balance on his precarious tightrope trip through life. "Man is doomed," he writes, "to be a product of culture, but not to be wholly cultural; and to be a product of nature, but not to be wholly natural." Half civilized, half beast, man struggles endlessly to harmonize the conflicting poles of his being. Pulled too far in either direction, he instinctively recognizes...
...laugh at the lady who wants to dress all cows, dogs and cats because she finds their natural state indecent," Milner says. "She is being too cultured. We laugh at cannibalism, on the other hand, because man is acting too much like an animal." Yet there are other forms of laughter that do not fit Milner's theory-the laugh of sheer physical or emotional exuberance, for instance...
Back in England, Milner compared his Samoan stock with the proverbs current in Europe, and was struck by the many similarities in structure, rhythm and content. It was almost as if the proverb shared a common source. Since this was culturally impossible, Milner considered another potential origin: the universality of human thought...
Regardless of their genesis, Milner argues, the best proverbs easily transcend ethnic and geographical barriers. They deal in the fundamental stuff of life: love and war, birth and death, sickness and health, work and play. Like the human mind itself, they seek the core meaning of things and the satisfying symmetry of antithesis. They touch the taproots of the mind without requiring the service of the intellect...
...answers must await further exploration of that greatest mystery of all: the processes of the mind. Milner's contention is that the proverb, the wild flower of human wisdom, may now help to direct the search into the deep...