Today, I was talking with a coworker about a person from whom I was having trouble getting information.

We were talking French and I used a very common expression. I said "It's like pulling worms from his nose." (C'est comme lui tirer les vers du nez. Well actually, I was talking Québécois so I said, "ouin, c'est comme y tirer é vers du nez." )

Now, every French Québecer knows this means you have a hard time getting information from somebody, but if you look at the sentence there is absolutely no way you could guess its meaning.

Do you know of any other expressions like this?

Like pulling hen's teeth.

"This dog won't hunt" (used mostly in the Southern United States.

"Put paid to" never made sense to me. It sounds like it should mean something like "paid off any obligations" as in "I put paid to my car a month ago, so I don't have to worry about car payments for a while."

bel, a warning: Faldage is conflating two expressions.

"Like pulling teeth" is the expression equivalent to your gross one. "Rare as hen's teeth" is something else -- do you have an equivalent for that?

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any expression that is similar to "rare as hen's teeth."

I don't think I'd be confused about what that expression meant if I heard it though. Same with "it's like pulling teeth."

Both seem very self-explanatory, whereas, if you look at the worms expression, you don't automatically think that it means it was hard to get information from the guy.

I seems odd to create an expression that isn't readily understandable.

seems odd to create an expression that isn't readily understandable.

I couldn't fail to disagree with you less about that. You're really looking out through your eyeballs.

Actually, my mother used to say "like pulling hen's teeth". ANother one was "like nailing jelly to the wall" when it was hard to get an opinion from someone. But what about something like "I wish he'd pull up his socks"? How would you know that meant "I wish he'd smarten up"?

The one I hate is "I could care less about that". Someday I'll have to kill someone and bury them in the rose garden.

Right on, Creith, bury him right next to him who has said
"I don't have a problem with that".

What I'd like to know is this: what is the difference between a problem and an issue? I once heard someone say that her dog had "territory issues". Dogs don't have issues. Dogs have territory, and they don't like trespassers. This is not an issue - is it? I'd also like to know the difference between "use" and "utilize" - I don't mean the dictionary definition. When someone says "we'll utilize our resources", is that different from "we'll use our resources"? When I challenged someone on that, he said that "utilize" meant to use more completely. I suggested that being made love to once was being "used", and being made love to six times was being "utilized", and he didn't get it. Wasn't amused, either.

Grrrrr. Straight eight, Creith! Don't bury those who over-misutilize the term "issues" in the rose garden, bury them instead, piece by piece, in the walls of a Trappist Monastery until they say they repent.

I could care less, but why bother?

Guessing: from to stamp a bill or invoice "PAID"

he didn't get it. Wasn't amused, either. Oh, ha! Elizabeth, you fit right in here with barely a ripple... You may be interested to see what we had to say in this thread:
http://wordsmith.org/board/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=miscellany&Number=129092

Thank you, Jackie! And I was jumping-up-and-down delighted with the thread you recommended. I recently heard an interview with Carol Shields' daughter (about adapting her mother's book "Unless" for the stage). This woman is a lawyer, and she said "I never use 'in the event that..'. What's wrong with 'If..'?"
Oh, yeah!

A variation on "pull up your socks" is "pull up your cotton." I heard it from my father who heard it from his. Since he was a blacksmith in the anthracite coal mines in Pennsylvania, I'll take a wild guess that it referred to pulling up the cotton wick in the coal-oil lamp worn on the miner's hat in order to get a little more light.

George F. Feissner
Math. Dept.
SUNY College at Cortland
Cortland, NY 13045

Welcome gffeissner.

That's a perfect example of an expression that is confusing today. In the time of your grandfather and father, it would have been common and easily understood, but if I used it on the street today, people would have no idea what I meant to say.

Is this expressing still common in your area?

George:

I kinda doubt it. Almost all of the lanterns I have seen from mining operations have been water-carbide. It's a brighter cleaner light and there's no wick to worry about.

When I saw your expression my immediate thought was that it had something to do with pulling up one's underwear.

I just grabbed my unfortunately one-volume American Heritage Slang dictionary (unfortunate because the bastards only published the first of three volumes, A-G) and left us hanging. Anyway, there is no elucidation under cotton, but there is the phrase "have had the cotton" which means doomed. "You've bought it, you've had the cotton."

This volume has dozens of these slang phrases in it. "Come off the grass" is stop talking foolishness.

And other oddities: Baby-snatcher; who woulda thunk it meant the brakeman on a passenger train.

Come out of a bag = behave in an objectionable manner

Give the bag = leave a person suddenly

TEd

Does it tell you why these expressions came about TEd? Curiosity would niggle at me constantly if I only knew the answer. I mean, once you know that give the bag means leaving a person suddenly, it's nice to know why it means that - how the expression came about.

I know there were coal-oil miner's lamps, since I've got one on my mantle (complete with cotton wick). The carbide lamps came later, followed by the electric ones, of course. the coal-oil lamps go back to the era of mine-mules, which my grandfather used to shoe.

George F. Feissner
Math. Dept.
SUNY College at Cortland
Cortland, NY 13045

NO explanations of how they came about, just citations to a place where they appear in print. That, to me, is the second drawback to the dictionary, the first of course being it's incompleteness.

To George:

OK. That goes back further than I knew about. Thaks for setting me straight.

TEd

I always found the French expression, "leche la fenetre" (lick the window or what I would call window shopping) odd until I went to France and found that stores don't often have windows advertising goods for sale but bakeries do!

(How's my spelling bel??)

Pretty good Zed. You're only missing a couple of accents - but I know very few folks have access to a French keyboard outside of Québec, so I know you knew that the accents had to go there but just couldn't put them in because of hardware limitations, eh.

Lèche la fenêtre (lick the window)
Lécher la fenêtre (licking the window)

I've never heard it put quite that way though. I've heard it as "faire du lèche fenêtre" (do some window-licking)

Bel, I was taught 'faire la lèche-vitrine' rather than using fenêtre.

Can you shed any light on whether this is a difference between French French and Quebecois French, or a sign of my age or something else entirely?

..and now I am thinking of all those words in French for 'window', because I am pretty sure we were also taught 'glace' for car windows. I understand that 'vitrine' tend to be oversize windows - retail premises rather than houses. What do you use for an office window?

And then there’s this:

lech·er: NOUN: A man given to lechery. ETYMOLOGY: Middle English, from Old French lecheor, from lechier, to lick, to live in debauchery, of Germanic origin.

Copied from AHD

And how did one stumble across this, Dixbie?

Simple:

Just lecher fingers do the walking.

HA HA HA!!!!! That was great!

And how did one stumble across this, Dixbie?

Umm. It just struck one as probable and so one went alookin'!

TEd, that was to a high standard of lecherdermain .

Vitrine, fenêtre, glace.

All of these are pretty much used around here Bridget. Vitrine being is the more proper term for a shop window of any size, but people will commonly say fenêtre(like the saying YUP instead of saying YES)

Regular windows are fenêtres, big or small.

Glace is used in the term "lave-glace" - the blue windshield washer fluid. Apart from that, the front window of a car is a pare-brise.

Sometimes, the word glace might be used to describe GLASS - but not necessarily in a window frame.

Confusing enough??

Bel, I love it! "pare-brise" = to pare (cut) the breeze...

Bel, I love it! "pare-brise" = to pare (cut) the breeze...

or the idiomatic equivalent of 'windsheild' --a piece of glass that protects by sheilding one from the wind--vs a peice of glass that protects by cutting the wind off-)

its basicly the same 'word' in either language.. (do you think it sounds better in french?) i think it sounds logical!

Also--as I read the above, the similarity between fenêtre and fenestrate struck me.

the similarity between fenêtre and fenestrate struck me

As well it might. The little hat over the e indicates that there was an s after the e time back way bck.

Really? Cool! Merci.
Query: my "gut" tells me that defenestrate (hi, tsuwm!) ought to be a transitive verb. Is there a reason for this? Even a semi-valid one, I mean? (I heard that, Anna! )

My gut tells me the same thing, Jackie.When you "defenstrate", you are not removing windows from your home, but throwing something (or someone) out a window. Hence you are defenestrating the object. Anna, however, will be much more concise and precise, I'm sure.

Here you are, Jackie, a link to the most famous defenestrations ever ...

http://www.answers.com/topic/defenestrations-of-prague

Sorry. I don't do windows.

Thanks, CK. Appreciated. Golly, will we ever stop thinking up ways to do each other in?

Ted, you said you don't do windows...hey, is there a word for throwing somebody out a door?

Yup, well in some cases I don't do Windows either. I converted my old, very slow PC to Linux a month or so ago. I call it "the Unfenestration of Irchester"

Divorce.

(to throw) A tub to the whale

Seems an odd idiom for "diversion" to us modern, land locked types.

(to throw) a tub to the whale
Is this a translation from another language? It does sound odd! Welcome to the monkey house, alcove!

Sounds like it means giving someone in trouble some totally inadequate help.

Of course it's transitive. Cf transom.

Iain:

Welcome to our little bedlam. Can you tell us the context of this phrase?

I knew Jonah was pretty fat, but I didn't ever notice that he was called any epithets in the Bible.

Though few know of the fate that eventually befell Jonah. He was eaten by a gigantic chicken. And thus we have the phrase "out of the leviathan into the fryer."

Sorry. Most of the old timers here have heard that before, but it's one of my favorites.

TEd

Or, "it's like getting blood from a turnip."

My goodness gracious, beanie--it is GOOD to see you again! It's been way too long!

Actually, when one stops to think about it, almost all idiomatic expressions are unintelligible when they are read literally. It's a common problem with ESLs.

all idiomatic expressions are unintelligible when they are read literally

That's a better definition than the one at Dictionary.com, bushmillsneat.

Dictionary.com - idiom

A speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements, as in keep tabs on.

Dave sez: almost all idiomatic expressions are unintelligible when they are read literally.

This is seemingly true beyond the English language, as well.

In Brazil, when two adult males meet, one may ask the other: "O que é que há com seu peru?" This question is literally about the other fellow's turkey. It is colloquially about one part of the other fellow's anatomy. Its conversational meaning is "How are you?" Neither the literal nor the colloquial meaning get one all the way to understanding the expression.

How they hangin', Pops?

or how's it hangin'?

Faldage asks: How they hangin', Pops?

Quite precisely.

Just got to this thread- wonderful! I read Jackie's post :
Bel, I love it! "pare-brise" = to pare (cut) the breeze...
I've got a new expression out of it, having to do with the dog's making noxious odors.
(Ducking behind a big stone for cover.)