Men and women create and quote sayings freely and value their clever use in everyday life as well as in poetry, the political arena, advertisements, and jokes. Proverbs are documented for about a millennium, from Firdawsī and Asad Ṭūsī to Dihkhudā. Over a dozen collections are in print in Persian, and the Office for Persian Languages reportedly is compiling tens of thousands of sayings. Most proverbs comment on general human conditions and, in the absence of grammatical gender markers, are appli…