if there's one thing that i think is really fun in this world, it's comparing idioms across languages. the ones that have equivalents and the ones that don't are equally delightful.
tonight i got to talking about this with my housemates, who are from lithuania. i'm english and have spent a portion of my life in thailand, so we had 3 languages to compare notes across. the best discovery was that the english 'out of the frying pan and into the fire' has much more zoological equivalents in the other languages: the thai 'escape from the tiger and meet the crocodile' and the lithuanian 'flee from the wolf and you may run into a bear'.
other particularly evocative things they have taught me are the insult 'a peppery goat' and to say a person or animal is clingy by calling them 'a wet leaf'
i'd love to hear any favourites from speakers of other languages!
In Spanish (Argentina) to say someone is trying really hard to find fault with something we say they're "trying to find the hair on an egg"
In Filipino English, to be prone to making dirty jokes is being "green minded". i... actually have no fucking idea why but it's a thing that we say here and it's kind of funny how far the phrase has gone in local dialect when it makes 0 on-the-face sense
green, dirty... mold, maybe? us Finns call such jokes (and those who make them) "two-minded", which is a tad more straightforward i think.
- going from one bad situation to another is to "[go] from a ditch to a puddle"
- having a vested interest in something is to "have [one's] own cow in the ditch"
- something that's far away, difficult to reach, and/or hidden or lost somewhere - to the point of frustration - can be described as being "(somewhere) behind god's back"
- someone who's wet behind the ears is a "yellow-beak"
(this one took me a while to figure out but i gather it's referring to snot coming out of a child's nose? tho i've no idea where "wet behind the ears" comes from) - if you tell someone to "go where pepper grows", you're telling them to get lost
- should you insult someone but end up as the laughing stock yourself later on, then "the insult hit [your] own ankle"
- something my mom used to say when i was young is "let's go bedbugs; the bed's on fire" - i think you can guess what this one's about
(this is starting to get kinda long already, but read below the cut for a bonus swear!)
there's a few funny swears as well, but i think my favourite "common" one is "jumalauta". it's the closest equivalent to "god damnit" - at least in how it's used. see, "jumal" (short for "jumala") means god, but "auta" does NOT mean "damn"; quite the opposite, it's the imperative form of "auttaa", or "help". so it effectively translates to "god help", although its tone when uttered is still mostly that of a curse of sorts.
there's also a slight "variation" (if you can call it that) in "ei jumalauta", i.e. "no god damnit" - i like to think of that coming from a situation being so absolutely fucked that "[even] god won't help" x3
