This verse opens the aside on scoffers and the wise, Proverbs 9:7–12.
Quick answer
A blunt observation about wasted effort: correcting someone committed to contempt costs the corrector and changes nothing.
Read the whole unit
Six verses sit between the two banquets, and they are not obviously about either one. They are about who can be taught. Correct a scoffer and you collect insults; correct a wise man and he loves you for it. Give instruction to the wise and he gets wiser. Then the book's motto returns, and the section closes with a line about bearing your own outcome.
On the placement. Interpreters have long noticed that these verses interrupt the two-banquet structure, and some treat them as displaced or inserted. This catalog treats them as their own unit standing where they stand, and reading them in place, they do real work: between two invitations that sound identical, the book pauses to talk about what makes a person able to hear at all. The question the banquets pose is which voice you answer. The question this section poses is whether you are someone who can still be told anything.
On verses 7 and 8, which get misused. "Do not correct a scoffer" is not permission to avoid criticism, and it is not a label to hang on someone whose challenge you would rather not answer. The scoffer in this book is defined by a settled posture of contempt toward correction itself, not by disagreeing with you. Using this verse to dismiss a person is the single most common misreading, and it is self-serving in an obvious way, because the one thing a scoffer would most like is a verse that ends the conversation. Read honestly, verse 8's real force is in its second half: rebuke a wise man and he will love you. The test the section proposes is not whether you can identify scoffers. It is how you take being told you are wrong.
On verse 10. The book's motto returns here in a second form, and it closes Collection I where 1:7 opened it. What the fear of the LORD actually means is defined by the book itself at 8:13, and it is not dread: it is hating what is evil, an aversion to what harms rather than terror of God.
What this verse contributes
This verse opens the section with the negative case, and it is startling in a book so committed to instruction. Everything up to here has been an argument for correction, and now the reader is told there is a person for whom it does not work. The point is not that the scoffer is beyond hope in any final sense; it is that correction is not the instrument that reaches him, because contempt for correction is the definition of his condition. The verse is describing a mismatch between a tool and a situation, which is a genuinely useful thing for anyone who has spent years arguing with someone who was never listening.
Related: Proverbs 15:12 · Proverbs 23:9 · Proverbs 26:4–5
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.