I was scouting around recently looking for information on the word “gnomic.” It seemed apropos for a comment I wanted to make on somebody else’s blog, and I thought I gnew knew what it meant, but wasn’t 100% positive.

One of the more thorough resources I located on this subject was the “Love to Know 1911” site, which is supposedly (who knows?) based on the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Here’s an abridged version of what it says there about “gnome and gnomic poetry”:

Sententious maxims, put into verse for the better aid of the memory, were known by the Greeks as gnomes, from [the Greek word for] an opinion. A gnome is defined by the Elizabethan critic Henry Peacham (1576?-1643?) as “a saying pertaining to the manners and common practices of men, which declareth, with an apt brevity, what in this our life ought to be done, or not done.” The Gnomic Poets of Greece, who flourished in the 6th century B.C., were those who arranged series of sententious maxims in verse… But the title “gnomic” came to be given to all poetry which dealt in a sententious way with questions of ethics. It was, unquestionably, the source from which moral philosophy was directly developed, and theorists upon life and infinity, such as Pythagoras and Xenophanes, seem to have begun their career as gnomic poets. By the very nature of things, gnomes, in their literary sense, belong exclusively to the dawn of literature; their naivete and their simplicity in moralizing betray it.

Which tends to confirm what Wiktionary tells us about “gnomic” in the informal sense:

(of a saying or aphorism) Mysterious and often incomprehensible yet seemingly wise.

In the event, I didn’t end up using “gnomic” in the comment. It fit, but (per the above) it can be pejorative, and I hate to hurt people’s feelings (or, alternatively, p!ss them off).

And anyway, I’d come across some distractingly interesting examples of Native American gnomic pronouncements. (Who knew?) These are from the eighteen-volume Cambridge History of English and American Literature (Ward & Trent, et al. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–21):

Watch him with his neighbour’s children.
Would you choose a councillor,
(Sioux)

Do not stand wishing for the fish in the water,
Go home and make a spear.
(Puget Sound)

And my favorite:

Of an affair which makes a great stir without getting forward the Micmac will say: “It goes like the canoe that the Partridge made.” The point of the comparison is in the fable of the Partridge who, observing that a canoe goes faster when the ends are well rounded, conceived the brilliant idea of a canoe which should be rounded on the sides also. The result was a bowl-shaped structure which went round and round without progress.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you these were primitive people.