A perverb (portmanteau of "perverse proverb"), also known as an anti-proverb, is a humorous modification of a known proverb, usually by changing its ending in a way that surprises or confounds the listener.
Perverbs were one of the many experimental styles explored by the French literary movement Oulipo. The term is attributed to Maxine Groffsky.[1] The concept was popularised by Oulipo collaborator Harry Mathews in his Selected Declarations of Dependence (1977).[1]
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According to Quinion,[1] the word perverb originally meant the result of splicing of the beginning of one proverb to the ending of another:
The term has also been used to describe a garden path sentence based on a proverb; namely, a sentence that starts out like the proverb, but ends in such a way that the listener is forced to back up and re-parse several words in order to get its real sense:
Perverbs beginning with Time flies like ... are popular examples in linguistics, e.g. to illustrate concepts related to syntax parsing. These examples are presumably inspired on the quip "Time flies like the wind; fruit flies like a banana", attributed to Groucho Marx.[3]
To be effective in written form, a garden-path perverb must have the same spelling and punctuation as the original proverb, up to the point where the reader is supposed to back up, as in the "time flies" example above. These spelling or punctuation constraints may be relaxed in perverbs that are spoken, rather than written:
The term is also used in the weaker sense of any proverb that was modified to have an unexpected, dumb, amusing, or nonsensical ending — even if the changed version is no harder to parse than the original:
The perverb "A rolling stone gathers momentum" (based on the saying by Publilius Syrus) is moderately popular in technology-minded circles, having been featured in several bumper stickers and T-shirts.
The word has also been used for puns on proverbs[1]:
Perverbs are popular in Russia,[4] especially on the Internet.[5] In the 1970s, the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda used to print them in its humor column. Some are derived from Russian proverbs by replacing Russian words with foreign ones, e.g.