Saying (Prykazka)

A prykazka is a fixed figurative expression that, unlike a proverb, does not form a complete judgment but only aptly characterizes a phenomenon, action, or state, and is grammatically part of a sentence: 'like snow on the head' (out of the blue), 'seven Fridays in a week,' 'neither fish nor fowl.' A saying lacks direct instruction or moral; it lends speech imagery and expressiveness and often arises from the 'contraction' of a proverb. The boundary between saying and idiom is conventional: both belong to paremiology and phraseology. The Ukrainian corpus of sayings is recorded in the collections of Matvii Nomys and Ivan Franko and in the 'Phraseological Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language.' Sayings are an inexhaustible source of folk expression, masterfully used by Ivan Kotliarevsky in the 'Aeneid' and by Ostap Vyshnia.