Proverb

“Birds of a feather flock together”

This is a proverb that Mandy didn’t learn from anyone and came across on the Internet and realized that it strongly applied to her life and her circle of friends. When she described her friends, she said that she had become friends with them because of the activities they participated in. She described how every friend she has met in the past few years; she has met through activities that her and her now friends both shared. Thus when she came across this proverb, she realized that she really did choose friends that were just like her and because of that they all have stayed friends.

Mandy believes that it is necessary to have the same interests and share the same qualities in order to become friends. When I discussed this with her, I realized that I didn’t necessarily agree. I firmly believe in the other proverb of “opposites attract.” I don’t believe that true, long lasting friends can really occur between people who are almost identical. I will acknowledge that sometimes best friends can be found and kept when you only share identical tastes and ideas with that one person, but I feel like when you have a group of friends that are all just like you, it tends to be a little dull and uneventful. We both agreed that similar interests are important in forging a friendship, but I still believe that too many common interests will just make for a boring friendship.

The reason I found this proverb especially interesting is because of how Mandy discovered it. By discovering it on the internet, Mandy showed the new way that folklore is being spread. The fact that Mandy discovered this proverb on a random website while researching something else, means that someone else posted that proverb and was taught that proverb some other way. Thus while I do think that this proverb is very important, the way that she found it was far more interesting to me.