I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears and Other Intriguing Idioms From Around the World (16 page)

SUGAR/CANDY/SWEETS/CAKES

Stomach fire
Hindi: indigestion

• To cost a candy:
  to be expensive (French)
  
• To fix the cake:
  to make amends (Spanish, South America)
  
• What a bonbon, and me with diabetes!:
  a street compliment (Spanish)
  
• To cut the cake:
  to take control (Spanish, Chile)
  
• To be a caramel:
  nice, a kind person (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• To think one is the hole in the center of the cake:
  to have a very high opinion of oneself (Spanish, Chile)
  
• To pull through cocoa:
  to ridicule (German)
  
• Eat a drop of one’s honey:
  have a finger in the pie (Russian)
  

BREAD

• To be as good as bread:
  to be as good as gold (Italian)
  
• To be better than bread:
  to be as good as gold (Spanish)
  
• To be like bread and cheese:
  well-suited, well-matched (Italian)
  
• To make a slice of bread and butter:
  make a fuss (French)
  
• Get your piece of bread:
  one’s comeuppance (Russian)
  
• Tough piece of bread:
  an old hand (Russian)
  
• Sugar bread and whip:
  carrot and stick (German)
  
• To rely on bread and not eat cheese:
  to be content with one thing (Spanish, Mexico)
  

STARCHES/RICE/POTATOES

• To not know potato:
  to know nothing (Spanish)
  
• The pure potato:
  cash (Spanish, El Salvador)
  
• To not have even a potato:
  to be broke (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• To be in the potato:
  to be in the money (Spanish, Panama)
  
• Not a potato:
  no joking matter (Russian)
  
• To be a potato:
  to be easy (Spanish, Chile)
  
• Sweet potato-ed up:
  a goofball (Spanish, Argentina)
  
• Kasha in the mouth:
  to mumble (Russian)
  
• Has eaten little kasha:
  is inexperienced (Russian)
  
• Eat up your kasha:
  get what’s coming (Russian)
  
• Walk around hot porridge:
  beat about the bush (German)
  
• To burn grilled rice cakes:
  to be jealous (Japanese)
  
• To eat cold rice:
  to be in the doghouse (Japanese)
  
• To eat bad-smelling rice:
  to be in jail (Japanese)
  
• You look like a clump of cooked rice:
  you look stupid (Chinese)
  
• To throw rice:
  to criticize (Spanish, Peru)
  
• To be like white rice:
  to be everywhere (Spanish, Latin America)
  
• We boil our rice only once:
  proverb (India)
  

CHEESE, BUTTER, & OTHER DAIRY

• To make a cheese:
  to make a fuss (French)
  
• To be the cheese on pasta:
  to be perfect (Italian)
  
• Give it to someone with cheese:
  deceive or make fun of someone (Spanish)
  
• Stick one’s nose in every sour curd cheese:
  be nosy (German)
  
• To put butter in the spinach:
  to improve one’s living (French)
  
• Like butter over the heart:
  music to one’s ears (Russian)
  
• To have butter, money from butter, and the woman who made it:
  to have it all (French)
  
• To have the face of bad milk:
  to look like one is in a bad mood (Spanish)
  

EGGS

• Look for hairs inside an egg:
  nitpick (Italian)
  
• Go cook yourself an egg:
  go fly a kite (French)
  
• To not eat an egg so as to not waste the shell:
  to be miserly (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• Owl egg sunny-side up:
  a practical joke (German)
  
• To sit on eggs:
  to be a recluse (Hindi)
  

VEGETABLES

• Onion head:
  someone with gray hair (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• Onion seller:
  overly sentimental (Spanish, Chile)
  
• Onion tears:
  crocodile tears, worthless tears (Yiddish)
  
• He should grow like an onion:
  with his head in the ground (Yiddish)
  
• Onions should grow from your navel:
  an insult (Yiddish)
  
• To do the leek:
  to hang around waiting (French)
  
• To save the goat and the cabbage:
  to have it all (French)
  
• To be an asparagus:
  to be skinny (French)
  
• Go fry asparagus:
  go fly a kite (Spanish)
  
• Left in a fine eggplant patch:
  in a mess (Spanish)
  
• Simpler than a steamed turnip:
  child’s play (Russian)
  
• Because of pure green peas:
  for no reason (Spanish, Peru)
  

FRUITS

• What a fruit:
  he is a rotten apple (Russian)
  

Onions should grow from your navel
Yiddish: an insult

• No place for an apple to fall:
  no space (Russian)
  
• Little mango:
  good-looking person (Spanish, Latin America)
  
• Ripe mango:
  an ancient man or woman (Hindi)
  
• To think one is the last suck on the mango:
  to think highly of oneself (Spanish, South America)
  
• Wind-fallen mangos:
  something easy or cheap (Hindi)
  
• A mango at the price of a stone:
  a great deal (Hindi)
  
• Have mangos and sell the seeds:
  have it all (Hindi)
  
• To not be a pear in sugar:
  to be difficult (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• To ask the elm tree for pears:
  to ask in vain (Spanish)
  
• To bring back one’s strawberry:
  to interrupt (French)
  
• To have bad grape:
  to be gruff (Spanish)
  
• Big avocado:
  bore, party pooper (Spanish, Puerto Rico)
  
• Take your tomato:
  get what you deserve (Spanish, Venezuela)
  
• To go to the pineapple:
  to fight (Spanish, Dominican Republic)
  
• To be a coconut:
  intelligent (Spanish, Latin America)
  
• To give papaya:
  something ridiculous (Spanish, Colombia)
  
• Melon:
  foolish, stupid (Spanish)
  
• Apple of discord:
  argumentative type (Spanish)
  
• To sell like ripe cherries:
  to sell like hot cakes (German)
  
• Squeezer of limes:
  a self-invited guest, an idler (Hindi)
  

MEAT & FISH

• Wine and meat friends:
  fair weather friends (Chinese)
  
• To fry a bologna sausage:
  to give special treatment (German)
  
• When dogs were tied with sausages:
  long ago (Spanish, Uruguay)
  
• Roll as a sausage:
  get lost (Russian)
  
• A land of fish and rice:
  a land of plenty (Chinese)
  
• To smell the roast:
  to be suspicious (German)
  
• To eat owl’s flesh:
  to act foolishly (Hindi)
  
• Dog cooker:
  an outcast (Hindi)
  
• Veal tenderness:
  sloppy sentimentality (Russian)
  
• A rubber eagle:
  a tough roast chicken (German)
  
• Meat in a kite’s nest:
  goes quickly, like hot cakes (Hindi)
  

OTHER FOOD & DRINK-RELATED IDIOMS

• Like chewing sand:
  unappetizing or dull food (Japanese)
  
• He brings the mustard along:
  he always has something to say (German)
  
• Add oil and vinegar:
  embellish a story (Chinese)
  
• To matter a cumin seed:
  to be unimportant (Spanish)
  
• Carve out pretzels:
  walk crookedly (Russian)
  
• To give a drink from a coriander husk:
  to tantalize (Hindi)
  
• Soya bean paste:
  insult (Japanese)
  

By candlelight, a goat looks like a lady
French: look before you leap

One’s belly is thick

I
T’S BAD ENOUGH THAT IDIOMS
in their own languages aren’t easily understood. You have to be in the know in advance to be able to substitute their intended meaning in your own tongue. That’s why idioms are the hardest things to learn in another language. Translating idioms from another language often doesn’t improve matters. A particularly malicious subcategory of words and expressions are those which, when translated, have a meaning that is very different in the destination language to that intended in the source language. These are known as
false friends.
You think you know them–but that apparent familiarity breeds misunderstanding.

Speaking of falsity, variations of the Ultimatum Game, which we met earlier, can be used to keep us honest. One of my favorite related quotes is from W. H. Auden. He said that our commitment to the truth was the “faintest of all human passions.” Though we frequently declare our interest in the truth, we just as frequently fail to behave accordingly. Some Ultimatum Game variants include information asymmetry. The Responder is
kept in the dark
about the size of the pie. In this situation, Proposers tend to offer significantly less than half, which is an implicit lie about the size of the pie.

An experiment called the “Eyes of Honesty” is another great example of how non-conscious factors can affect the faintest of our human passions. It was carried out by Gilbert Roberts and two colleagues from the psychology department at Newcastle University in the U.K., where a coffee club operates on the honor system. Students are supposed to contribute every time they help themselves to a cup of coffee. To quote from the
New York Times:
¹

“For 10 weeks…[the researchers] alternately taped two posters over the coffee station. During one week, it was a picture of flowers; during the other, it was a pair of staring eyes….

A remarkable pattern emerged. During the weeks when the eyes poster stared down at the coffee station…drinkers contributed 2.76 times as much money as in the weeks when flowers graced the wall [a 300% increase]. Apparently, the mere feeling of being watched—even by eyes that were patently not real—was enough to encourage people to behave honestly. Roberts says he was stunned: ‘We kind of thought there might be a subtle effect. We weren’t expecting such a large impact.’”

And I’m stunned also! Clearly, although everyone consciously knew the eye poster wasn’t really watching, they couldn’t help but be non-consciously affected.
*

We can also be our own false friends. Ambrose Bierce, in his
Devil’s Dictionary,
defines a
liar
as “a lawyer with a roving commission.” That’s an excellent summary of the role of our “inner lawyers,” which is an expression used by Jonathan Haidt in his excellent
Happiness Hypothesis.
He uses
inner lawyer
to describe another cognitive bias that’s baked into our minds. We rarely disinterestedly weigh all sides of a decision as we like to think we do. We usually operate with motivated reasoning. We frequently have a preference (often non-consciously arrived at) and send our inner lawyers off on a “one-sided search for supporting evidence.” As soon as we have support for the answer we wanted, we stop gathering evidence, and we stop paying our inner lawyers. We all suffer from this confirmation bias. Haidt uses an underlying metaphor throughout his book to describe the relationship between our conscious and non-conscious minds. The former he thinks of as a monkey riding the latter, which is an elephant. In this case he says our elephants are not inquisitive clients for our inner lawyers.
²

ANIMALS

• He’s really a chicken:
  easily fooled (Italian)
  
• To die chicken:
  to not reveal a secret (Spanish, Chilean)
  
• A good duck:
  a sucker (Japanese)
  
• Pluck the turkey:
  make love at a window (Spanish)
  

Dog tail remains crooked
Arabic: a leopard doesn’t change its spots

• Dog tail remains crooked:
  a leopard doesn’t change its spots (Arabic)
  
• Female fox:
  nasty, bitchy woman (Spanish)
  
• To be made foxes:
  to be in bad shape or badly dressed (Spanish)
  
• Bull:
  eunuch or impotent man (Hindi)
  
• A cat defecates:
  to pocket something stealthily (Japanese)
  
• To set the dogs on someone:
  to flirt (Spanish, Latin America)
  
• To have some quality of a dog:
  to be stylish (French)
  
• Go to the dog house:
  go to bed when very tired (Spanish)
  
• To make music:
  to complain (French)
  
• To lay a rabbit:
  to stand someone up (French)
  
• To have eaten a monkey:
  to be crazy about someone (German)
  
• A fly on the nose:
  a chip on the shoulder (Italian)
  
• To undo a bear for someone:
  to pull someone’s leg (German)
  
• To become a tiger:
  roaring drunk (Japanese)
  

COLORS

• To be in the green:
  broke, poor (Italian)
  
• A blue prince:
  an ideal man (Spanish)
  
• To make blue:
  to take the day off (German)
  
• To see nothing but blue:
  to be in the dark, blissfully ignorant (French)
  
• To be blue:
  to be drunk, plastered (German)
  
• To not be green:
  to dislike (German)
  
• Yellow:
  green with envy (German)
  

APPEARANCES

• One’s belly is thick:
  big hearted (Japanese)
  
• To be tied up:
  to be well turned out, very chic (French)
  
• One’s belly balloons:
  to get frustrated from being quiet (Japanese)
  
• Stick face:
  person with a lot of nerve (Spanish, Chile)
  
• To pull up the bottom of one’s kimono and reveal the buttocks:
  to maintain a defiant attitude (Japanese)
  
• By candlelight, a goat looks like a lady:
  look before you leap (French)
  
• Square:
  well built (Spanish)
  
• To give someone a big head:
  to bash someone’s face (French)
  

PEOPLE & PEOPLE PARTS

• To pull one’s trousers down:
  to surrender (Italian)
  
• To bang your butt on the ground:
  hysterically funny (French)
  
• To stick one’s chin out:
  to become exhausted (Japanese)
  
• To tighten one’s belly:
  to set one’s mind (Japanese)
  
• To scratch someone’s back:
  to outsmart someone (Japanese)
  

To pull the hair from someone’s nostril
Japanese: to dupe

• To take by the chin:
  to caress, to appease (Hindi)
  
• To put saliva on one’s eyebrows:
  to take with a grain of salt (Japanese)
  
• To lower the outside corners of one’s eyes:
  to be pleased (Japanese)
  
• To pull the hair from someone’s nostril:
  to dupe (Japanese)
  
• To take off the nose ring:
  to become a widow (Hindi)
  

To bite the moon
French: to try the impossible

• To be born in a shirt:
  to be born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth (Russian)
  
• To produce wind at the corners of one’s mouth:
  to be eloquent (Chinese)
  
• One’s liver is extracted:
  to be dumbfounded (Japanese)
  
• To cure one’s belly:
  to get revenge (Japanese)
  
• To grasp someone’s tail:
  to obtain evidence (Japanese)
  
• From the view of the nose:
  rule of thumb (French)
  
• Butt is fringed with noodles:
  to be very lucky (French)
  

FOOD

• To throw rice:
  to criticize (Spanish, Peru)
  
• To peel the garlic:
  to work like a dog (Spanish, Chile)
  
• To cost a candy:
  to cost an arm and a leg (French)
  
• To eat twice a day:
  to have enough to eat (Hindi)
  
• To make a slice of bread and butter:
  to make a fuss (French)
  
• Squeezer of limes:
  a self-invited guest, an idler (Hindi)
  
• To fry a bologna sausage:
  to give special treatment (German)
  
• I’m not hanging noodles on your ears:
  I’m not pulling your leg (Russian)
  

ROMANCE

• To hang oneself:
  to get married (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• To give the package:
  to stand up (Italian)
  
• Oversized pants:
  a man pushed around by his wife or girlfriend (Spanish)
  
• To have fast hands:
  a womanizer (Japanese)
  
• To strike the four hundred blows:
  to sow one’s wild oats (French)
  
• To leave someone nailed:
  to dump someone (Spanish)
  

MONEY & WORK

• Criminal:
  intelligent; well done, extraordinary (Spanish, Puerto Rico)
  
• The big head:
  the boss (Italian)
  
• Salty:
  pricey (Spanish, South America)
  
• To give [someone] time:
  to fire someone (Japanese)
  
• To count stars:
  to twiddle your thumbs (Russian)
  
• Big shoe:
  incompetent (Italian)
  
• To wear the pants well placed:
  to impose one’s authority (Spanish)
  

ACTIVITIES

• To make music:
  to complain (French)
  
• To let off one’s gun:
  to have a great time (French)
  
• To ring one’s bell:
  to eat (French)
  
• To make wind:
  to brag (German)
  
• Give a greeting to the oldest woman in your house:
  insult (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• To put someone to sleep:
  to deceive someone (Spanish, Mexico)
  
• To go to open country:
  to relieve oneself (Hindi)
  
• To make an occasion white:
  to spoil it (Italian)
  
• To roll over while sleeping:
  to double-cross someone (Japanese)
  
• To look on over one’s shoulder:
  to look down on (German)
  
• Window-licking:
  window shopping (French)
  
• Thumbs up:
  illiterate (Hindi)
  
• To bite the moon:
  to try the impossible (French)