Meaning & Analysis
Erecting houses and marrying off one’s children consume large amounts of money and resources.
Insights
Prestige drains
Projects tied to status—grand houses and splendid weddings—invite spending beyond prudence, turning honor into hidden debt.
Unseen costs
What begins as a single outlay breeds add-ons—repairs, furnishings, dowries, gifts—so that true expense far exceeds the estimate.
Parental obligation
The duty to ‘establish’ children (settlements, portions) binds parents to heavy transfers that reshape a household’s economy.
Capital to consumption
Savings converted into walls and weddings become illiquid; wealth is locked into display and ceremony rather than productive use.
Sweet impoverishing
These are ‘good’ expenses—joyful, honorable—and thus dangerously tempting; affection and pride lubricate overspend.
Early modern finance
Building required materials, craftsmen, and later maintenance; marrying children entailed dowries/portions and feast-days—recurring, socially policed costs that could thin estates.
Honor economy
Reputation rode on façades and festivities: a bare front or meager bridal could shame a family, so display spending functioned as compulsory signaling.
Opportunity cost
Money buried in brick or banquets does not earn; the proverb warns that visible assets and unforgettable days may impoverish invisible balances.
Gendered transfers
Daughters’ marriages moved wealth out via dowry; sons’ establishments (apprenticeships, commissions) demanded capital—structural outflows encoded in kinship.
Countermaxims
Kindred sayings—‘building is a sweet impoverishing,’ ‘building is a thief’—form a chorus that cautions planners to discount optimism and include lifetime upkeep.
Rhetorical Devices
Parataxis
Two heavy undertakings set side by side—‘building and marrying’—create an additive, drumbeat emphasis on cumulative cost.
Isocolon
Balanced noun phrases give the line a bookkeeping cadence, suiting its fiscal warning.
Metonymy
‘Building’ stands for the entire cycle—design, materials, labor, maintenance; ‘marrying’ for dowries, feasts, settlements.
Understatement
Calling them ‘great wasters’ is dryly economical, letting listeners supply vivid examples from experience.
Aphoristic closure
The compact, categorical form sounds like household law, aiding memory and transmission.
Transcription
Quotations
Much building, and often bridalls make bare pastures, and naked side-walls.
*Gall.
Bigging [building], and Bairns marrying are great Wasters.
What Expence building of Houses, and marrying of Children requires, is best known by Experience.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.