“When I find myself in times of trouble / Mother Mary comes to me / Speaking words of wisdom / Let it be.” — “Let It Be” by Paul McCartney

Even a friend’s father, who like many adults in the early ’70s didn’t like the Beatles’ music, told us, “That’s good advice, boys, just let it be,” as the song played on the radio while he drove us to football practice.

Unfortunately, not all words of advice are as prescient as those that came to McCartney in a dream about his late mum. And words of advice are what we’ll be looking at today — suggestions that can be either good or bad depending on how we look at them, as well as a few wise sayings that actually contradict one another.

It’s very common for the definitions of words that describe wise sayings to overlap, no matter what they’re called. For example, a proverb, which gets its name from the Latin “proverbium” or “words put forward,” is a piece of folk wisdom that tries to summarize a basic truth. “Better late than never,” for instance, and “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

Yet when you come right down to it, a proverb is pretty much the same thing as an adage. From the Latin “adagium” or “I say,” an adage is actually defined as “a proverb or short statement that expresses a general truth.” A couple of good examples would be the contradictory pieces of advice: “Haste makes waste” and “He who hesitates is lost.”

Proverbs and other sayings that impart an important truth have been around for ages, and it’s because of that longevity that they’re often looked upon as nothing more than cliches. According to one cynic, “Proverbs are invaluable treasures to dunces with good memories.”

More current are anecdotes, a word derived from the Greek “anecdota” or “things unpublished.” They’re short stories about things at hand that add personal knowledge, experience or even humor to a situation, and then often get shared in a wider population. For example, “I dressed as an owl last Halloween, it was a real hoot,” or the story of how Ronald Reagan, after being shot, told the doctors who were about to operate on him, “I hope you’re all Republicans.”

From the Latin “maxima (propositio)” — literally, largest proposition — a maxim is a general rule or principle, which include the again-contradictory “You’re never too old to learn” and “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” as good examples

Then we have the aphorism, which comes from the Greek “aphorizein” or “define,” such as Francis Bacon’s observation that “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.”

An apologue — from the Greek “apologos” or “story” — is a fable that usually has animals (or insects) as characters and contains a simple moral lesson, such as “Slow and steady wins the race” from the story about the tortoise and the hare.

And finally, an epigram, which takes its name from the Greek “epigramma” or “writing upon,” is said to be a concise expression that contains wit or irony. A good one is Mark Twain’s “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”

Like I said, not all words of wisdom are as valuable as those of Paul McCartney, so, if you’ve found the words of advice in this column to be wanting, remember that this is just my two-cents worth and you get what you pay for.

Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at jlwitherell19@gmail.com.

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