You can hope in one hand and shit in the other, see which one fills up first.
Dare I ask which country speaks words that cannot be truer.
Edit: saw your instance…
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.
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.
巧妇难为无米之炊 – “even the cleverest house wife cannot cook without rice”.
You can’t paint the Mona Lisa with crayons.
Kind of related to yours, “You’re putting lipstick on a pig”
“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.
You can’t polish a turd.
“Even if you give an ape a ring, it’ll remain an ugly thing.” -Netherlands.
A golden ring specifically
Polish - „you can’t make a whip out of shit” „z gówna bicza nie ukręcisz”
You can’t pick a naked man’s pocket.
That’s nature’s pocket.
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)
“You can’t expect pears out of an elm tree” or “No le pidas peras al olmo”
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?”
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”.
Yeah, nah .
Australia
.ǝʇɐɯ ɐu ,ɥɐǝʎ
