A reflection upon the fictional roots of apothegms with examples of southern Khorasan axioms

The fast and every day development of mass media and public education has brought with it ignorance to the oral culture of people in different regions. That is why some who care about the culture of people try to gather and classify these materials in each region in order to promote their usage and to preserve them as well. The author of this article presents a summary of his field studies on apothegms which he has gathered for about two decades and presents the results of his comparisons between those apothegms and three thousand local sayings. While categorizing the stories the author found out that the roots of a great number of famous axioms are fictions and ancient tales which were told by people to especially their children for educational and moral purposes. As time passed those stories were forgotten and only some phrases of them were left which gradually turned into famous and widely used sayings.