[dang]

The Idiotisms and Proverbs section is one of the more hilarious and I wonder how many of them can be mapped back to originals. The only one I could trace is A horse baared don't look him the tooth, which presumably maps back to Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Probably quite a few of them are no longer common in English either by now, which makes computing the inverse harder.

[kgeist]

I could decode these, because there are equivalents in my native Russian:

>"With tongue one go to Roma"

= you can achieve anything with good communication skills

>"It want to beat the iron during it is hot"

= seize the opportunity while you can

>"to come back to their muttons"

you say "let's go back to our sheep" when you realize you digressed

[happyopossum]

> >"It want to beat the iron during it is hot"

“Strike while the iron is hot” is a well known English saying as well. Guess blacksmith wisdom is universal.

[jamiek88]

Yes in (British) English we have ‘strike while the iron is hot’.

And one that Hacker news and Silicon Valley didn’t coin but made famous is in this maybe, sorta:

> A bad arrangement is better than a process.

Which can be stretched to ‘Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good’ or ‘real engineers ship’!

[Reventlov]

We have the exact same idioms in French for the last two (battre le fer pendant qu'il est encore chaud, and revenir à nos moutons) !

[kwhitefoot]

> battre le fer pendant qu'il est encore chaud

Do people actually say that? Seems very long winded.

[johnaspden]

Using the power of not pronouncing most of the letters and speaking very very fast, they can get it down to:

batlefe pend ki letencoshow

which is more manageable.

[waterpowder]

Not super often but yes, although we'd often skip the "encore"

[msrenee]

Happy to see the classic American phrase, to craunch the marmoset. Makes me crave apple pie and LSD.

[dang]

Lol. To me it sounds like a line from Jabberwocky.

[frozenlettuce]

>horse baared don't look him the tooth => "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth"

The original Portuguese expression would be "A cavalo dado não se olha os dentes"

[anthk]

Spanish, too. "A caballo regalado no le mires el diente".