<P> The saying may not be authentic to Syrus; the Latin form usually given, Saxum volutum non obducitur musco, does not appear in the edited texts of Publilius Syrus . It does, however, appear with similar wording in Erasmus' Adagia, which was first published around 1500 . It is also given as "Musco lapis volutus haud obducitur", and in some cases as "Musco lapis volutus haud obvolvitur". </P> <P> The literal meaning of the statement itself is true . The television show MythBusters showed that after six months of constantly rolling a stone does not grow moss . </P> <P> Because it is so well known, this saying is one of the most common proverbs used in psychological tests for mental illness, particularly schizophrenia, to look for difficulty with abstraction . American research conducted in the 1950s between Air Force basic airmen and hospitalized Veterans Administration patients with schizophrenia found that the way a person interprets proverbs can be used to determine abstraction ability . The lack of abstraction ability in these studies was statistically significantly higher in the VA patients and it has thus been construed as indicating pathology . As persons with mental illness are generally believed to demonstrate "concrete" thinking (a tendency to interpret abstract concepts literally) the research results have, in practice, often been improperly generalized to suggest proverbs alone can be a sufficient indicator of mental illness . </P> <P> A "concrete" interpretation of the proverb "a rolling stone gathers no moss" would simply restate the proverb in different words, rather than delivering any metaphorical meaning . </P>

A rolling stone gather no moss meaning in hindi