I was thinking about the phrase ‘The pot calling the kettle black’. It comes from a time where cooking was done over open fires and cookware would become visibly ashy. (Fun fact: It first appears and was perhaps coined by Cervantes in Don Quixote!)
What are some other idioms that have lost their literal connection to time? What would be a good modern replacement?
Oh, man, when it comes to nautical idioms, I could go on all day. There are so many, and they’ve lost their literal connections so thoroughly, you probably don’t even think of some of them as idioms. A few that occur to me immediately:
- taken aback (wind on the wrong side of the sails)
- give a wide berth (extra space for a vessel to maneuver)
- leeway (unwanted downwind slippage of the vessel when in motion)
- above board (on deck, the board being the section of the hull running fore and aft just above the water line)
- onboard (to load onto the deck of the ship)
- go by the board (to fall off of the ship into the water, passing the board on the way)
- hand over fist (two-handed motion to pull in sails, ropes, etc. as quickly as possible)
- high and dry (above the tide line)
- loose cannon (a gun insufficiently secured would cause havoc on a warship when fired, or as the ship rolled in waves)
Honestly, I’m not sure that I want modern equivalents, since many are so rich in imagery.
Batten down the hatches too.
Honestly, I’m not sure that I want modern equivalents, since many are so rich in imagery.
I do love the imagery of “loose Canon”, and by “love” I mean that as it’s been described and depicted, it’s a truly horrifying situation. So it makes for a really visceral image.
A quick aside: there’s this murder mystery/logic puzzle game called “the Return of the Obra Dinn” that takes place on a merchant ship. The game is basically like a series of still frame dioramas that you have to analyze and figure out what’s going on. There’s a particularly striking scene with a cannon which breaks loose from its chains and several unfortunate sailors. It took me a long time to actually find the third sailor in the scene… (There wasn’t a lot left)
Very nice! Amazing how ingrained they’ve become. “That new recruit is a car without brakes” just doesn’t ring the same does it?
Also today I was literally at the bitter end anchoring a boat with almost all of the available chain.
Don’t forget “I like the cut of your jib”
Three sheets to the wind!
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure – I’ve occasionally heard English speakers say this (or something similar) much to the confusion of the Japanese folks around. I guess one could swap ounce/pound to gram/kilo, but I think it could use replacing.
Checking in from the States… The fuck is a “gram/kilo”? Nah, I’m kidding. It’s cocaine, right?
Yep. A gram is one cocaine. A kilo is a group of cocaines.
I think the collective now. Is “a sniffling”.
That is my understanding, yes.
The gram kg probably already exists, I think?
Maybe, but I’ve never heard anyone say it (other than me when this comes up which is maybe once every year or two). That said, it may well exist in other, more sensible countries.
In Dutch we have the similar “een gewaarschuwd man is er twee waard” - loosely translates to “a warned man is worth two”
Eating a dead horse - not unless you buy the budget beef mince at Tesco
Read like rabbits - rabbits can’t read or even hold books
Nip it in the butt - that’s sexual assault, you’re not allowed to do that any more
Get down off your high horse - you’re not allowed to get animals high either
Kids should be shorn and not herd - goats have hair, not wool, and can’t be shorn. Their natural tendency to herd is a difficult behaviour to break.
Under the weather - unless you’re a pilot you’re going to be under the weather most of the time
A blessing in the skies - unless your bishop is a pilot too, that’s not going to happen.
Fight off more than you can chew - I don’t know where to start with this one,
surely there’s a /s or a trollface i’m missing
I’m not pulling your Greg, if that’s what you mean.
You leave my Greg alone. He’s perfectly capable pulling himself & if he needs help I have gloves!
I was half expecting that to have been posted by LadyMondegreen
You almost got me.
I always thought it was “nip it in the bud” where a bud is the early stage of a plants development / before the flower emerges on a flower. So meaning “kill it before it grows larger and that becomes harder”
Has to be trolling because they are all wrong.
Under the weather is right.
Boneappletea
I don’t think it’s the char/open fire but rather that both pot a d kettle would be made of the same black cast iron
Alternatively, shiny kettle and the pot sees its own black reflection in it.
(But yeah, I assumed they’re both black/cast iron)
I love head over heels as, in love.
It’s vice versa that makes actual sense, but that was considered too obviously risqué in the age the phrase was coined.
My head over her heels ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Not quite updating, but in my house we say “like sweeping the yard” to indicate that something is pointless and wasting time.
“Boss has us doing obviously pointless busy work today”
“Yeah, next he’ll be having us sweep the yard!”
Or derogatorily:
“I want you to go do that thing.”
“Sure, you want me sweep the yard when I’m done?”
With the invention of leaf blowers, “sweeping the yard” is real! Or at least for literal yards …… I have no idea in your industry
Raking the forest
Don’t put the cart before the horse.
Don’t submit your post before you write it.This comment is about to be legen-
pation
Wait for it …
“Keep the carriage in the wake of the mare.”
Don’t buy crypto before it’s settled lol
Ass over teakettle.
I don’t think there is a modern equivalent idiom for taking a sloppy fall
Ass over tit, I have heard.
Which I expect ass over teakettle is actually a polite euphemism for
No it’s not a euphemism. It’s literally walking down the stairs with a teapot and falling and … Well
Arse over tit is in an identical British expression for the same thing
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ass_over_teakettle
It’s the same as ‘head over heels’ in that the bottom part of your body (your ass) and the top part of your body (your breast/chest) switch places.
I feel like we have to assume the description of how your body moves is the prime definition (head over heels, or any variation) and any substitution of words like ass over teakettle is a playful alteration which works and is understood primarily because people are familiar with the original and understand the alteration through context of use.
“break a leg”
No, please don’t.
Isn’t the joke the if you break a leg you get in the “cast”?
Doesn’t that one come from the German idiom “Hals- und Beinbruch” (break your neck and legs) to wish someone good luck? Which in turns comes from a very butcherdly spoken jiddish phrase meaning (have success and be blessed).
Don’t remember where I heard it, but I thought the origin was related to actors and performers. It was a superstitious thing that if you wished someone good luck on stage you would jinx it so instead they did the opposite and wished for the worst. I could be very wrong!
And isn’t that somehow attached to a specific Shakespeare play, but then became universal?
There’s a superstition among actors about speaking the word “Macbeth” outside of the play, but I don’t think telling people to “break a leg” is specifically linked with it. Two separate actor superstitions.
One thing is certain… Actors are weird.
Threshhold
from the time we spread threshes on the floor inside homes and a lip was needed to keep them spilling out.
Modern version?
Ohdear. Cause you yell something along that line when you hit it with your toe.
“One bad apple will spoil the whole barrel” desperately needs to be replaced because nobody has experience with storing apples in barrels so when Michael Jackson subverted it they took it unironically and now many people think it means the opposite.
I’m not techy but something about one line of bad code can jank the whole program?
“A bad link breaks the chain” maybe. Or “one bug causes an infestation” for the idea that you can’t just solve the initial problem once it gets bad, it spreads if not dealth with
Maybe if we just apply “you find one cockroach, there’s a million in the walls” to the same problems like bent police and corrupt politicians…
I assumed the idiom was from a time when all cookware was made of cast iron.
In Portuguese the equivalent expression is timeless: “o sujo falando do mal lavado” (the dirty one talking about the badly washed).
Always love idioms from other languages. Had a book called “Idioms Delight” that explored equivalents from several different cultures/languages.
in Hungarian it’s “the owl calling the sparrow ‘big-headed’” 😄
we usually shorten it to just “owl calling the sparrow” (doesn’t have the same ambiguous meaning as English)
In Arabic “The net is making fun of the sieve”
I didn’t mentioned it above, but found that very similar to it in Spanish where we say “El burro hablando de orejas al conejo” (the donkey talking about ears to the rabbit) which we shorten to “El burro hablando de orejas” (the donkey talking about ears)
I always thought of that idiom as the pot (something generally cast iron and not polished) calling the kettle (something that is polished and therefore reflective) black.
Being that the pot sees itself in the reflection, but calls the kettle that as a derogatory thing, unknowing of it’s personal alignment.
I think that the phrase is so old that the difference between a pot and a kettle might have been fairly subtle differences in shape, but both would be black cast iron.
Which is nowhere near as profound as your interpretation.
whats the point of a modern replacement? idioms connect us across time and when they really have not modern sense (which there is enough understanding of cookware I don’t think we hit that with pot and kettle) then it becomes an interesting backstory.
To be funny is why.
No real reason, just something to talk about while we all wait around to die really 🤷. I agree with your sentiment - the stories and imagery behind old idioms actually make them more interesting, I dont think they’ll be going anywhere soon!
