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Six said properly
Leïla's line 7 is the argument of the lesson, and it is not about proverbs. It is about what happens to a fixed phrase in the mouth of someone who has it nearly right. Ordinary sentences tolerate approximation: a slightly odd preposition or a wrong tense is heard as an accent. A fixed phrase does not, because the listener knows the exact string, and a word out of place makes them stop and reconstruct it instead of listening to you. That is the mechanism, and it is why six exact proverbs are worth more than thirty approximate ones. **Where they come from.** French proverbs draw on the same wells as English ones and a few of its own: the Bible, Latin, medieval French, and above all La Fontaine's *Fables*, which every French child learns by heart and which has given the language whole sentences — 'rien ne sert de courir, il faut partir à point', 'la raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure'. A French speaker quoting La Fontaine is doing something closer to quoting Shakespeare than quoting a proverb, and knowing that the source is a fable with a plot makes the line stick. **How often they are actually used.** Less than a learner expects. Textbooks teach proverbs by the dozen; conversations contain few, and the ones that appear are mostly the short expressions — 'poser un lapin', 'tomber dans les pommes', 'avoir le bras long' — rather than the full sentences. Learn the expressions for use and the proverbs for recognition. **The false friends are the real hazard.** Many French and English proverbs are near each other without being the same, and the near miss is worse than not knowing. 'Qui vivra verra' is closer to 'time will tell' than to 'we shall see'. 'Ce n'est pas la mer à boire' is 'it's not that hard', not 'it's not the end of the world'. 'L'habit ne fait pas le moine' is about being deceived by appearances, not about judging a book by its cover, and the image is different enough that mixing them produces a sentence with a monk and a cover in it. **And in Morocco**, Leïla has a second set. Moroccan Arabic is rich in proverbs and she translates them into French when she wants them, introduced with 'on dit chez nous que' — which is a move you can copy with your own language. A proverb from somewhere else, flagged as such, is always welcome; a French one said slightly wrong is not.