Can you get a proverb wrong, or only use it in a new way?
My son sent me an essay that quotes a proverb I have known all my life: Obi nkyerɛ abɔfra Nyame, "No one shows a child God". His essay reads it as saying children should be left alone to find religion for themselves. That is not how I heard it from my mother. We say it to mean that knowledge of God is so plain that even a child has it without being taught.
I told him he had it wrong. He said a proverb has no single meaning, that the elders themselves use the same proverb for different situations, and that his reading is just a new situation. I did not have an answer ready, which annoyed me.
He is half right. At a funeral and at a land dispute the same proverb can be thrown in for very different reasons, and a clever speaker is praised for finding a new use. But surely there is still a difference between using a proverb cleverly and not knowing what it says.
So my question for people who read about these things: can a proverb be misread, the way you say a poem can be misread? Or does the meaning only exist in the using?