PLAIN DEALING is dead and died without issue

Insights

End of Virtue

The proverb signifies the extinction of honest behavior, suggesting that sincerity and openness are no longer practiced or valued in society.

Moral Sterility

By noting that 'plain dealing' died 'without issue,' the phrase metaphorically underscores that honesty has left no successors—no inheritors or continuers of its virtues.

Societal Decline

The proverb laments the perceived decay of moral standards, expressing nostalgia or despair for a lost age of integrity and truthfulness. The reference to 'dying without issue' borrows from legal and genealogical language, dramatizing the total absence of honest heirs.

Literary Irony

Writers like B. Rich and Franklin employ the phrase with a note of irony and satire, mourning plain dealing as a relic of the past—often to criticize their own society's corruption, duplicity, or hypocrisy.

Universal Disillusionment

The complaint about the 'death' of honesty appears across cultures and eras, reflecting a perennial skepticism regarding the endurance of virtue in the face of worldly ambition and deceit.

Rhetorical Devices

Personification

Plain dealing is treated as a living entity that can die, lending emotional force and immediacy to the lament.

Legal/Genealogical Metaphor

The phrase 'died without issue' uses the language of inheritance law, intensifying the sense of finality and absolute loss.

Irony

There is a sharp ironic undertone in mourning the death of honesty while implicitly accusing society of being its murderer.