# Idioms that don’t make sense to you



## Foxridley (Jun 6, 2022)

There are a lot of idioms out there. But some of them don’t make all that much sense, or their wording doesn’t seem that close to what the idiom means.
For me it’s “have your cake and eat it too” which refers to wanting two good things that are unlikely to go together or may be mutually exclusive.
But the wording doesn’t seem to indicate that. If you don’t have any cake, you can’t eat any. If you say “I’m going to have some cake,” it means that you intend to eat some cake. And what is the point of having a piece of cake in your possession, if not to eat it?
Only recently, I learned that the meaning is in the sense of “eat your cake and still have it.”
So why not say it that way?


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## Punji (Jun 6, 2022)

"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth."

I don't want a dying horse, believe it or not. Of course it's rude to inspect a gift in front of the person but it's not exactly unheard of to give one's problems away while pretending to be kind.


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## Nexus Cabler (Jun 6, 2022)

"Throw the baby out with the bath water"

When you empty a small tub that your child was cleaned in, you'd think it would be common sense to take them out before carrying the thing outside and pouring it in dirt.

It comes from an old Germanic proverb from a book, but I can think of one more relatable and easier to visualize in modern times, such as "Don't spill your pasta when you empty the pot water"

I'll keep working on something : p


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## Yastreb (Jun 7, 2022)

"Birds and bees"

In other germanic languages, and my native Finnish too, it is "flowers and bees" which makes sense since bees pollinate flowers so the fertilization analogue is there. But why _birds_ and bees? Since when have bees had anything to do with bird reproduction?


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## Dragoneer (Jun 7, 2022)

My favorite is "sell like hot cakes" because it always gives me a mental image of pancakes, and just can't imagine a situation under any circumstance where people'd go rushing for pancakes. Now, a fresh, still warm from the oven cookie...

That saiiiiid, I had to look it up as I'm ever curious. Apparently the origin is several hundred years old, and implies hot cakes (more of a crepe) was THE fair food to get back in the day, kind of on par with a funnel cake or deep fried Twinkie. So... I guess in the end I can imagine it after all, but my brain still defaults to pancakes, and everybody who's ever eaten a pancake enjoys the ride, then after about five minutes goes "Oh no." as their belly-laden carb bomb detonates.


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## Fallowfox (Jun 7, 2022)

Yastreb said:


> "Birds and bees"
> 
> In other germanic languages, and my native Finnish too, it is "flowers and bees" which makes sense since bees pollinate flowers so the fertilization analogue is there. But why _birds_ and bees? Since when have bees had anything to do with bird reproduction?


Do you know whether other Germanic languages had this phrase before English adopted 'birds and bees' in the nineteenth century?

Perhaps other Germanic languages adapted an imported phrase to force it to make more sense.


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## Fallowfox (Jun 7, 2022)

*double post*.

In England when something is good we say it's the 'dog's bollocks', where 'bollocks' is slang for testicles. 

...Because everybody likes dog balls. They're just wonderful.


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## diqe (Jun 7, 2022)

Foxridley said:


> There are a lot of idioms out there. But some of them don’t make all that much sense, or their wording doesn’t seem that close to what the idiom means.
> For me it’s “have your cake and eat it too” which refers to wanting two good things that are unlikely to go together or may be mutually exclusive.
> But the wording doesn’t seem to indicate that. If you don’t have any cake, you can’t eat any. If you say “I’m going to have some cake,” it means that you intend to eat some cake. And what is the point of having a piece of cake in your possession, if not to eat it?
> Only recently, I learned that the meaning is in the sense of “eat your cake and still have it.”
> So why not say it that way?


I opened this thread to say this exact idiom, it's so confusing! I wonder if the phrase was translated from another language.


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## Kumali (Jun 7, 2022)

diqe said:


> I opened this thread to say this exact idiom, it's so confusing! I wonder if the phrase was translated from another language.



Wikipedia is our friend!





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						You can't have your cake and eat it - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


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## Yastreb (Jun 8, 2022)

Fallowfox said:


> Do you know whether other Germanic languages had this phrase before English adopted 'birds and bees' in the nineteenth century?
> 
> Perhaps other Germanic languages adapted an imported phrase to force it to make more sense.


No idea, I just saw in Wiktionary that Dutch, German, Danish and Swedish all have "flowers and bees", and if all those are the same you can bet Norwegian is the same too.

Who knows, maybe the English version is not related to the other Germanic languages at all. The flower part could be convergent evolution. I believe Russians speak about pistillate and staminate flowers, so flowers seem to be a common theme in all the versions.


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## Fallowfox (Jun 8, 2022)

Yastreb said:


> No idea, I just saw in Wiktionary that Dutch, German, Danish and Swedish all have "flowers and bees", and if all those are the same you can bet Norwegian is the same too.
> 
> Who knows, maybe the English version is not related to the other Germanic languages at all. The flower part could be convergent evolution. I believe Russians speak about pistillate and staminate flowers, so flowers seem to be a common theme in all the versions.


I cannot find a wiktionary entry for 'die Blumen und die Bienen', (if I have that translation correct).

The 'etymology' section of the page you're looking at might help.

edit; so I found it. The German translation uses the suffix 'chen' to make the expression cuter. 




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						die Bienchen und Blümchen - Wiktionary
					






					en.wiktionary.org
				




No context is provided for the phrase's origin. 

My bet is that 'Voegelchen' just doesn't role off the tongue, so the Germans made a substitution.


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## Ziggy Schlacht (Jun 8, 2022)

"Six of one or half dozen of the other"

Not because the meaning isn't clear, it's similar to "potato, potato" (po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to) in that it means two things that look different but aren't. No, this one is confusing because it's rarely said right. "Six or one or half dozen" "Six of one half, dozen of the.." Six, Or on half, dozen..." "Six and one.." It's one I've heard so many nonsense permutations on I had to actually look it up for this post.


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## Kumali (Jun 8, 2022)

Ziggy Schlacht said:


> "Six of one or half dozen of the other"
> 
> Not because the meaning isn't clear, it's similar to "potato, potato" (po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to) in that it means two things that look different but aren't. No, this one is confusing because it's rarely said right. "Six or one or half dozen" "Six of one half, dozen of the.." Six, Or on half, dozen..." "Six and one.." It's one I've heard so many nonsense permutations on I had to actually look it up for this post.



A friend of mine and I used to mess with that one intentionally. My two favorite variations we came up with were "Six of one half and a dozen of the other" and "Six of one-half dozen and the other." Neither of which make any sense, of course (especially the second one), which is why we liked them.


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## Foxridley (Jun 8, 2022)

Ziggy Schlacht said:


> "Six of one or half dozen of the other"
> 
> Not because the meaning isn't clear, it's similar to "potato, potato" (po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to) in that it means two things that look different but aren't. No, this one is confusing because it's rarely said right. "Six or one or half dozen" "Six of one half, dozen of the.." Six, Or on half, dozen..." "Six and one.." It's one I've heard so many nonsense permutations on I had to actually look it up for this post.


Never heard these variants before, but I didn't even know the normal phrase until a couple years ago. Instead, I was brought up with "a horse a piece."


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## Guifrog (Jun 10, 2022)

I fail to remember if there is an English equivalent to our "cabelinho de sapo" (literally "frog strand of hair"), usually used to represent a "fine line" of something, i.e. that tiny thing that could make a huge difference.


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## Ziggy Schlacht (Jun 10, 2022)

@Guifrog Semantically different but "the straw that broke the camels back" might work. Usually refers to that one last, trivial thing that caused something to go wrong.


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## Kumali (Jun 10, 2022)

Ziggy Schlacht said:


> @Guifrog Semantically different but "the straw that broke the camels back" might work. Usually refers to that one last, trivial thing that caused something to go wrong.



Or the shorter version, "the last straw."


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## Mambi (Jun 10, 2022)

"The best thing since sliced bread"

Ummm, bread slicing is not a difficult task that requires large skill levels. There *must* be better linchpins in human development to compare to!


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## Ziggy Schlacht (Jun 13, 2022)

Mambi said:


> "The best thing since sliced bread"
> 
> Ummm, bread slicing is not a difficult task that requires large skill levels. There *must* be better linchpins in human development to compare to!


Thing is, pre-sliced bread didn't get "invented" until 1928, and it was a huge step in convenience. The expression is mostly because everyone could relate to how much nicer it was to not have to cut bread all the time, you could just grab a slice. Sounds funny now because its so dated.

As a side note - things that are older than sliced bread
Fax Machine - 1843
Machine guns - 1885
Women's right to vote in US - 1920
Betty White (RIP) - 1922


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## SystemSearcher (Jun 13, 2022)

It isn't really a proverb, but the very boiling frog analogy for the slippery slope never made sense to me. Mostly because the original experiment that birthed this analogy involved a deliberately lobotomized frog.

So I guess that the correct understanding of the phrase would be "The only way that the slippery slope fallacy is true is if the culprit deliberately alters the situation until the desired outcome of the slope is inevitable, otherwise everyone has their limits".


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## Ziggy Schlacht (Jun 13, 2022)

It doesn't make much sense because the frog doesn't really illustrate slippery slope. It teaches a parallel - but distinct - concept. The difference is failure to notice change based on either conscious (slippery slope) or unconscious (frog) acts. 

For an example that I know got a lot of people during the pandemic's early days is drinking. You didn't have anywhere to go, so you had a drink more often than you wouldn't. Never really much, but consistent. Suddenly, you can't remember the last day you didn't have a drink. There's your "boil the frog" moment - you didn't consciously decide to drink more, it just happened. Furthermore, you never made a comparison to any other situation to justify it, you just compared it to the environment. 

Similar is plenty of people don't notice how hot or cold their house has gotten until they leave it or someone comes over and then they have a new reference. I didn't realize my heat was dead one winter until my office was a full 15 (F) degrees below what it normally is. Granted, that's partially because I was working so not paying as much attention, but the point still stands. My room cooled slowly enough I didn't catch on until it was noticeably colder.

Slippery slope, however, would be if you had gone "well last night I had a beer, so whatever I'll have two" then the next day "two, three, eh not that different" followed by "three, four, I'm already well in the hole" and suddenly it's 9 drinks. Here it's a conscious act, you're comparing how many drinks you had tonight to what you had the previous night, _not_ to your baseline of one drink.

A different example for slippery slope that I know has also nailed other people is feeding you cat. Normally you feed him at 5, but he's really insistant so you feed him at 4:55, then 4:50... and so until somehow it's 3:30. Again your comparison is to the previous feeding, not the baseline.


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## SystemSearcher (Jun 13, 2022)

Ziggy Schlacht said:


> It doesn't make much sense because the frog doesn't really illustrate slippery slope. It teaches a parallel - but distinct - concept. The difference is failure to notice change based on either conscious (slippery slope) or unconscious (frog) acts.


Another of my issues with that idiom is that said idiom isn't actually true. It's been experimentally proven to be false, the frog does actually jump out if the water gets too hot, no matter how slow you increase the temperature, because movement is their primary form of thermoregulation in the first place.


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## Ziggy Schlacht (Jun 14, 2022)

You stated as much, which was my point - the truth, or lack there of, of the boiled frog doesn't change the concept of a slippery slope. It's a rhetorical (fallacy, technically) device used to show that one minor allowance now can lead to major allowances later. While it's a fallacy because it relies on hypotheticals to make a point, there's plenty of examples where such arguments have come perfectly true. At no point do frogs, lobotomized or otherwise, come into it and using such a frog as an example of one is incorrectly applying the concept.

But also, idioms rarely have to be true - bull in a china shop was disproven by Mythbusters. The situation where a single (weight undefined) piece of straw breaking a camel's back is basically impossible. There have been quite a few life changing inventions since sliced bread. "Eat cake and have it to" is about the worst way to phrase that for clarity.


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## Rimna (Jun 15, 2022)

"Bob's your uncle" is one of those english sayings that make no sense to me. It means that something is just that simple or that easy. Like "put the water to boil, salt it, put the pasta in and Bob's your uncle."

No he isn't. Who the hell is Bob?

In Bulgarian we have a saying that literally translates to "Spoken word, thrown stone" - it means that you gave your word and you must follow up with what you said. Why would we throw stones after saying something is beyond me. Maybe people in the past were like "Hey man, I'll be making some steak tonight, wanna come over?" *Throws a stone at his neighbor*

"Oh that sounds great man, I'll be there at 6 and I'm bringing beer" *throws a stone back*


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## Foxridley (Jun 15, 2022)

Rimna said:


> "Bob's your uncle" is one of those english sayings that make no sense to me. It means that something is just that simple or that easy. Like "put the water to boil, salt it, put the pasta in and Bob's your uncle."
> 
> No he isn't. Who the hell is Bob?
> 
> ...


Never heard that one, but it’s not an American expression, so that much makes sense.
I looked it up and apparently it goes back to an act of nepotism from a prime minister named Bob.


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## Yastreb (Jun 16, 2022)

"Exception confirms the rule"

This is literally the opposite of true. I bet this was made up by people who were salty about someone finding a counter-example to their favourite rule, so they just started claiming that being proven wrong actually proves them right somehow. This one exists in a ton of languages too.


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## Fallowfox (Jun 18, 2022)

Yastreb said:


> "Exception confirms the rule"
> 
> This is literally the opposite of true. I bet this was made up by people who were salty about someone finding a counter-example to their favourite rule, so they just started claiming that being proven wrong actually proves them right somehow. This one exists in a ton of languages too.



I love this idiom because it's such hot nonsense. x3



Foxridley said:


> Never heard that one, but it’s not an American expression, so that much makes sense.
> I looked it up and apparently it goes back to an act of nepotism from a prime minister named Bob.



A tradition we continue to practice in Britain.


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## Kumali (Jun 19, 2022)

Yastreb said:


> "Exception confirms the rule"
> 
> This is literally the opposite of true. I bet this was made up by people who were salty about someone finding a counter-example to their favourite rule, so they just started claiming that being proven wrong actually proves them right somehow. This one exists in a ton of languages too.



From Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge: "Two original meanings of the phrase are usually cited. The first, preferred by _Modern English Usage_ by Henry Watson Fowler, is that the presence of an exception applying to a _specific_ case establishes ('proves') that a _general_ rule exists. A more explicit phrasing might be 'the exception that proves _the existence of_ the rule.' Most contemporary uses of the phrase emerge from this origin, although often in a way which is closer to the idea that all rules have their exceptions. The alternative origin given is that the word 'prove' is used in the archaic sense of 'test.' In this sense, the phrase does not mean that an exception demonstrates a rule to be true or to exist, but that it tests the rule, thereby proving its value. There is little evidence of the phrase being used in this second way."

"For Fowler the original and clearest meaning is thought to have emerged from the legal phrase '_exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis,'_ an argument attributed to Cicero in his defense of Lucius Cornelius Balbus. This argument states if an exception exists or has to be stated, then this exception proves that there must be some rule to which the case is an exception. The second part of Cicero's phrase, '_in casibus non exceptis'_ or 'in cases not excepted,' is almost always missing from modern uses of the statement that 'the exception proves the rule.'"

Sounds like the phrase did have some trace of logic once, even if people who use it now are blissfully unaware that it makes no sense the way they're using it...





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						Exception that proves the rule - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


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## ben909 (Jun 19, 2022)

"this statement is false"


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