I don’t think the difficulty in getting actual life-improvement out of “a stich in time saves nine” comes from any impossibility in figuring out what that phrase means.
For what it’s worth, I have met people who had no idea what “a stitch in time saves nine” means, although I do agree largely with your point.
I think that the extra contextual information and life experience is the actual wisdom here, and that’s what hasn’t been zipped in the first place.
There’s some nuance here—I think we’re agreed that the contextual information and life experience is the wisdom. It’s what isn’t communicated by the pithy saying that matters—and yet the pithy saying is clearly meant to point to or contain the contextual information/life experience.
Which is to say that while pithy sayings are useful ways of reminding someone who already has the wisdom to apply it in a given situation, they’re useless for actually conveying wisdom.
And in my experience, the latter is the way they’re most commonly used.
For what it’s worth, I have met people who had no idea what “a stitch in time saves nine” means, although I do agree largely with your point.
There’s some nuance here—I think we’re agreed that the contextual information and life experience is the wisdom. It’s what isn’t communicated by the pithy saying that matters—and yet the pithy saying is clearly meant to point to or contain the contextual information/life experience.
Which is to say that while pithy sayings are useful ways of reminding someone who already has the wisdom to apply it in a given situation, they’re useless for actually conveying wisdom.
And in my experience, the latter is the way they’re most commonly used.