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?
A stitch in time saves nine.
This refers to a time when clothes were hard to come by and often homemade. If they tore, a small tear could be fixed with one stitch of needle and thread, but if let go too long, it would take many more stitches to repair a bigger rip.
Change your oil (or tires) in time, or change your car.
In my home country they say “Cheap as Onions” (eq in English : Cheap as Dirt)
Looking at the prices on Onions nowadays …
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 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
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.
All the horse ones because we don’t use horses anymore. There a ton of them.
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Who tf gets a gift horse?
Saddle up. Who tf has a saddle?
Hold your horses. Who tf has horses to hold?
Get off your high horse. Who tf has a high horse?
Beat a dead horse. WTF.
To update replace all with car.
Dont look under the hood of a gift car.
Buckle up.
Hold your engine.
Get out of your limousine.
Turn the key on a drowned engine.
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Who tf gets a gift horse?
A buddy in college accidentally said “gifted horse“. Then his girlfriend said “very much so” and we never let him hear the end of it
Great examples! ‘champing at the bit’ also comes to mind. I think cars fill in pretty nicely as a horse substitute. ‘Saddle up’ has ‘buckle up’. Hold your horses has ‘Hit your brakes’. As for gift horses… ‘Don’t look a gift car under the hood?’ Hmm doesn’t quite work
“Don’t check the resale value of a gift car” maybe
But presumably a gift horse is worth something as long as it walks. This summer my kid got a “gift car” and it was critical look at both the undercarriage and the resale value. Thank goodness he was only out the cost of a tow and mechanics inspection
Quit horsing around. You’re really putting the cart before the horse.
Edit: sorry, gotta go. I need to see a man about a horse.
I dunno. Yamiks still beats on horses… In both ways.
“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…
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.
To be honest, I was never prepared to know what “hoisted by one’s own pitard” meant, and knowing today, I still have no clue how this was ever relevant to any time period.
A pitard is a timed bomb used to to blow down a door or wall. The idiom is about blowing yourself up mistakenly instead. Were people using these routinely at some point?
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Blowing up or at least weakening a portion of a castle wall during a siege would be useful to the besiegers. Even a small petard could break into a building for nefarious purposes. And being a sapper is notoriously dangerous even now.
Of course Shakespeare could have used the name of a larger bomb, or “speared with his own sword” or something. But Shakespeare’s audience would also have clocked the fact that pétard is a French pun from péter which makes it a fart joke. And he never missed a chance for a fart joke.
So is “hoisted” in this case the equivalent of “yeeted”?
Ain’t no two ways about it
before the invention of doorknobs, doors were indeed single use. they would be blown open with every use. this is why we invented chamber pots. midnight bathroom breaks were very loud, before people had pots.
I would like to subscribe to your history newsletter.
They don’t need to have been used routinely, just knowledge of their use had to be common. In the same way that “shooting yourself in the foot” makes sense even to people who have never used a gun. It was enough to know what “hoist” and “petard” meant to piece together the intent of the phrase. Then once the phrase itself became common the specific knowledge was no longer necessary.
Britta will explain: https://youtu.be/KuuafUtVte0
“Burning the midnight oil”
Ignite the midnight petroleum.
Never getting your phone on the charger?
24/7 bandwidth draw?
Good one! I would offer ‘Draining the house battery’ as a replacement but it doesn’t really have a ring to. Maybe ‘You’ve been living in low blue light mode’. No that’s even worse! somebody help me here 😅.
Don’t put the cart before the horse.
Don’t submit your post before you write it.“Keep the carriage in the wake of the mare.”
Don’t buy crypto before it’s settled lol
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.
In Portuguese the equivalent expression is timeless: “o sujo falando do mal lavado” (the dirty one talking about the badly washed).
FYI this can still happen on liquid propane stoves, so not totally lost to time.
Maybe “Kill two birds with one stone”, because who hunts with stones anymore?
As a software dev I’ll offer ‘Kill two bugs with one patch’ as a replacement.
and put 4 new ones in :)
bugs
Touché!
I think I remember seeing a PETA post years ago that suggested “feed two birds with one scone”
Yeah that one bugs me. I can feed multiple birds with one scone easily. I’m putting in too much effort here, but this recipe has the macronutrient mass of a single scone at 90g. The average crow weighs about 300-600g. I chose it because it’s a common bird that would be interested in scone and that people like to feed, that’s on the bigger end of birds people feed (outside waterfowl). One crow isn’t eating nearly a third of its mass in one go, a sixth maybe. Songbirds aren’t even getting close to that.
Killing two birds with one stone implies some skill or fortune. You wouldn’t say it to describe picking up tomorrow’s groceries with today’s. Feeding two birds with one scone is only difficult or fortunate if those birds are geese, and even then I assume the only reason two managed to get their bills on that thing is because they’re fighting over it.
Also scones are terrible for the health of birds as are all breads. It’s frankly on point that peta would be dumb enough to make their animal friendly term equally as harmful to animals.
I prefer “Get two birds stoned at once”
“it’s a twofer!”
