Yeah, nah .
- Australia
.ǝʇɐɯ ɐu ,ɥɐǝʎ
Nah, yeah
Yeah yeah nah, nah yeah.
New Zealand
You can’t polish a turd.
I dunno, man… Look up coprolite. You can absolutely polish them.
Having looked at some of the reports I have to clean up, I can tell you that yes, in fact, you CAN polish a turd
You CAN polish a turd but it’s still shit
You can’t polish a turd; you can roll it in glitter.
Polish - „you can’t make a whip out of shit” „z gówna bicza nie ukręcisz”
I can sure as hell try
I think this takes home the prize for weirdest.
I like this one
I imagine it wouldn’t hurt as much as a whip, but probably equally intimidating.
“You can’t get blood from a stone” is classic in the US. “No more juice from the squeeze” is another variant.
How is that even similar?
How is it not? The euphemisms all mean you “cant get X from Y.”
Both of my examples mean exactly that.
“You can’t make a silk purse from sows ear” means you can’t make something nice from rubbish. “You can’t get blood from a stone” means attempting something difficult, if not impossible and futile”. E.g. “trying to get my kids to tell me about their school day is like trying to get blood from a stone.” It doesn’t matter how hard I try I get nothing.
A sow is a female pig, which doesnt produce silk at all. Attempting to get silk from it would be difficult, if not impossible and futile. It wouldn’t matter how hard you try, you would get nothing.
You can get as much silk from a sows ear as you can get blood from a stone. I dont see much differnce, but i guess the sows ear phrase requires more culture context if it means “you can’t get something nice from rubbish.”
One of the versions I have heard about this analogy comes from corn silk. The corn fed to pigs is usually of the lowest quality, and if you use the silk from cheap ears of corn, you won’t be able to make a useful purse out of it
You can hope in one hand and shit in the other, see which one fills up first.
Oh my god, I did not expect to be hit with the wisdom stick THAT hard
Don’t worry it missed you.
Ayyylmao jk love you.
Dare I ask which country speaks words that cannot be truer.
Edit: saw your instance…
In sweden there is the same but with spit in one hand, wish in the other.
Sorry, sir, I like shit.
That’s right. It’s from New Zealand.
That is actually pretty funny.
It’s incredibly fun to drop on people when they innocently 'I hope blah blah blah.
You can’t pick a naked man’s pocket.
That’s nature’s pocket.
The prison wallet
“Make sure he doesn’t pick your pocket!”
巧妇难为无米之炊 – “even the cleverest house wife cannot cook without rice”.
The proverb you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear means you can’t create a fine product from inferior materials.
I’d argue it’s closer to 朽木不可雕^. 巧婦難為無米之炊 (巧妇难为无米之炊) is more like you can’t make stuff without the necessary requirements.
^朽木不可雕: Lit. Rotten wood can’t be carved, metaphorically You can’t teach a student that is too dumb.
… Well actually no. Upon looking into these 3 idioms further while composing this comment, I leaned more and more towards that 巧婦難為無米之炊 is actually closer. Why? Because 朽木不可雕 applies only to humans and it puts more of a focus on the rotten wood (aka the dumb student).
I guess this comment was kind of useless lol but I decided to post it anyway because I put in way too much effort
I guess we use “Making gold from straw” (German).
Isn’t there literally a German fairy tale about someone able to make straw into gold?
Rumpelstiltskin.
Naomi Novik wrote a lovely book inspired by it called “Spinning Silver.”
Yes, that’s where it’s from.
Probably the closest in Irish is “is deacair olann a bhaint de ghabhar” (it’s hard to get wool from a goat)
Depends where you live I guess. Mohair and cashmere come from goats.
You can put your boots in the oven, but that don’t make 'em biscuits
“You can’t expect pears out of an elm tree” or “No le pidas peras al olmo”
German for “like father, like son” is “the apple doesn’t fall far off the tree trunk”. But many people nowadays use “the apple doesn’t fall far off the pear tree”, which is a variant that I think originally was supposed to suggest illegitimate fatherhood.
That’s interesting, because “the apple doesn’t/didn’t fall far from the tree” is a known Anglophonic saying that basically means that a child turned out a lot like a parent (gender not necessarily specified). I wonder if one is a calque of the other.
The above poster isnt really correct. We have an actual saying that is the literal translation: "Der Apfel fällt nicht weit vom Stamm ". And it means exactly what you suggest, a child being very much like one of their parents in one way or another.
Like father, like son exists as well, “Wie der Vater so der Sohn”.
Lmao your username 😭
You’re right, I forgot about the fact that there’s a literal translation. But besides being gender-neutral, both sayings mean the same, no?
My main point was that many Germans now regularly use the pear-tree malapropism, however.
Isn’t that more like “you can’t ask an elm tree for pears?”
And even more literally “don’t ask for pears to the elm?”
Lipstick on a pig along with others already mentioned.
cuir síoda ar ghabhar; is gabhar fós é
In Australia there’s “you can’t polish a turd”
But you can roll it in glitter
We use this one also
“You can’t put lipstick on a pig” was popular for about a year in the US, circa 2007
If I understand the original idiom, the nearest French expression would be “you can’t make a race horse from a donkey” (“tu ne peux pas faire un cheval de course d’un âne”).
