Asklemmy @lemmy.ml frightful_hobgoblin @lemmy.ml 1 mo. ago

What is your country's "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear"?

68 comments

Yeah, nah .

Australia
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
Polish - „you can’t make a whip out of shit” „z gówna bicza nie ukręcisz”
- I think this takes home the prize for weirdest.
- I can sure as hell try
- 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 pick a naked man's pocket.
- That's nature's pocket.
  
  The prison wallet
  
  “Make sure he doesn’t pick your pocket!”
- Challenge accepted.
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.
  
  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.
巧妇难为无米之炊 -- "even the cleverest house wife cannot cook without rice".

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/巧婦難為無米之炊
- 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
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.
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.
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.
- 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
In Danish we have "you can't cut the hair off a bald guy"
- Can't demand with a laddle if you are offered a spoonful
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”).
"Even if you give an ape a ring, it'll remain an ugly thing." -Netherlands.
- A golden ring specifically
In the US there's the saying "you can't squeeze water from a stone"
- I always heard it as blood from a stone, but yeah.
You can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit
- You can make cattle feed out of it though.
You can't paint the Mona Lisa with crayons.

Kind of related to yours, "You're putting lipstick on a pig"
Can't demand with a laddle if you are offered a spoonful
it should just be deleted

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