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by kgeist 1258 days ago
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

3 comments

> >"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.

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’!

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) !
> battre le fer pendant qu'il est encore chaud

Do people actually say that? Seems very long winded.

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.

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