Sayings you dont understand
- Thread starter Merkavar
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i'm assuming it means like someone using an isolated example to pretend it's hte majority and using it to make/prove a ruleThundero13 said:
twistedmic said:
i posted that as a joke, i know what it meansOT: probably because i am Méxican but i do understand all the sayings that go in the United States, because i can relate to being taught hundreds if not thousand sayings that are common in Spanish (whereas i think there are far less in English)
I always thought it was "you can only skin a cat once" like you can pluck all the hairs off forever but if you skin the cat then thats all you'll ever get.Vangaurd227 said:
-Dragmire- said:You can't be seriousGralian said:
Next thing you'll tell me is that there's a patron Saint of Waffle
It's him!
OT:A penny for your thoughts.
is it about the worth of the thought itself or the worth of the thought to the person listening to it?
edit: A stitch in time saves nine. no idea wtf this means.
Bread was tough back before we processed the hell out of anything, and while you can use a knife, getting pre-cut slices meant that one piece would be the same as the next so you'll have consistency. At least thats what food network says.
I don't understand any of the sayings my best mate says. He has a hilarious habit of mixing sayings, such as "Ah, now the table's on the other foot." or "Now the cat's out of the bottle."
You got that one backwards. "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." It means that what you have is more important than what you don't have.King Toasty said:
"Bull in a china shop." The Mythbusters busted the hell out of that one.
"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth." No. Seriously, what the hell?
That's just a poorly worded line. If Obi-Wan had said "Only a Sith believes in such absolutes," it would have made a lot more sense. But, for want of a single word....Dags90 said:
Pretty much this.Uber Evil said:
On the one hand, you say you "don't understand" the "from the bottom of my heart" idiom, but that's clearly not true - you definitely understand what someone means when they say it.
The thing you don't understand about the saying isn't its meaning, it's the the compositionality. As it turns out, a lot of language is incredibly problematic if you want to be able to speak about it entirely compositionally, not just idioms.
Sayings like these are pretty great examples though. My favourites are where repitition has lead to accidental reversals of the saying becoming more common than the original, making it not just compositionally weird, but seemingly completely contrary to the actual meaning of the saying.
Two of the most common ones (I've seen a few others in this thread too):
"I could care less."
"A bird in the bush is worth two in the hand."
Also, this thread is rife with folk etymology. You should trust approximately none of it. And again, these things aren't supposed to make sense compositionally. When it comes down to it, the fact that most language seems to be mostly compositional is by most estimations pretty accidental.
People fuck this one up all the bloody time. And, the fuck-up is always due to poor punctuation.Traskelion said:
"A stitch, in time, saves nine." Proper maintanence prevents heavy repairs.
You might have heard it stated as "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
I like the sound of that one.Kiefer13 said:
A modern day interpretation might be - don't gamble.
It comes about because "I couldn't care less" became a stand-alone idiom some time ago. When people say it, they don't think about what each word means and put it all together: it's just a stock phrase that means a particular thing as a whole in the same way that "fire truck" is a particular thing not entirely dependent on the two words (if it were, you'd have no idea if someone were talking about, say, a truck that was on fire, or a truck owned by a pyromaniac). Since they're already not paying attention to its composition, it's extremely easy to lose those consonants (words lose and gain sounds all the time, especially if they happen to sound similar to other words) and, since the composition of the phrase doesn't matter, losing the consonants really doesn't matter either. The best way to think about phrases like "I could(n't) care less" is to think of them as really long words. If a vast number of people pronounce the word in a particular way, it's pretty silly to say that that's an "incorrect" pronunciation.NOLAftw said:
People who think that people are "incorrect" when they say "could care less" necessarily have a fairly tenuous understanding of how language actually works.
There is a translation problem here that I suspect started with Latin. What the saying really means is "the (apparent) exception that tests the rule". So if there is a case that (apparently) proves the rule wrong, but it can be shown that rule does not apply to that case, then the case is actually evidence for the rule instead of against it.TheDarkEricDraven said:
I think it is a translation problem, because in Spanish probar means "to test" or "to try", but is also used to mean "to prove". And as spelled it looks more like "prove" than "test". In English there are two words with slightly different meanings, but in at least one language based on Latin, there is one word that combines those two meanings. Easy to understand the fuck-up.
"More or less"
The most meaningless expression I've ever heard. More or less...well, you've covered two-thirds of the possibilities there.
There's a lot of other one's I can't remember. Living in the Southern US, there's tons of incomprehensible expressions around.
The most meaningless expression I've ever heard. More or less...well, you've covered two-thirds of the possibilities there.
There's a lot of other one's I can't remember. Living in the Southern US, there's tons of incomprehensible expressions around.