> "raining buckets" Really? Which part of the UK does that come from. Where I come from *Nort Wilts.) the related phrase would be "It's bucketing down!" but I've never heard anyone say "It's raining buckets!".
it's a common expression here in the US, at least! unsure about the UK.
It would be exceedingly funny, if the expression had become idiomatic in the US, _because_ of the book.
(However, it might have come to US English from Spanish which is pretty close to Portuguese and thus ultimately from the same source as the book?)
I am reading a book on fuzzy logic that was translated from Japanese. The translation is quite bad and difficult to read. At one point it was talking about calculus and mentioned Newton and "Ripunitz". It took me a minute to work out what I was reading:
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.
Happy to see the classic American phrase, to craunch the marmoset. Makes me crave apple pie and LSD.
Lol. To me it sounds like a line from Jabberwocky.
A cartoon I saw years ago shows two men sitting at a table in a café. There's a book or two on the table. One says to the other: "Why you be not happy with me as translator of books by you?"
It seems likely that this is the cartoon, but I can't figure out what the original source is: https://www.jokejive.com/images/jokejive/23/23a74af0b0d51ee4...
Wow, thanks! That's the one. Funny how memory drift made it different in my head...but it has been many years.
How did you find that?
Now if someone can figure out the source, that would be even more amazing.
Other examples here, including the famous Welsh road sign translation ("I am not in the office at the moment"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21502019
Or this picture which was posted on Reddit today: https://i.redd.it/2duk9a273o9a1.jpg
The "incorrect" use of comprise is correct and has been in use since the 18th century [1]. 1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/comprise
Sure, it has a history. Any use that is described as incorrect has a history, else it wouldn't come up. Is it distracting? Is there another word that perfectly replaces it, is understood by practically all English speakers, and that's not distracting? Yes and yes, so: "to be composed of" should be preferred. I further doubt, very much, that the choice to substitute "to be comprised of" is an informed one in very near…
Cool. Words are defined by how people use them, not the other way around. People have been using it enough for the "official" definition to have expanded to include your pet peeve usage, and is undeniably actually correct usage no matter how many paragraphs you type out having no relevance to the matter. Complaining about it won't accomplish anything, it's over. Unless your goal is to try to change the definition of "incorrectly" to mean "in ways I don't like", which would be really surprising given the rest of your comments.
It seems likely that this is the cartoon, but I can't figure out what the original source is: https://www.jokejive.com/images/jokejive/23/23a74af0b0d51ee4...
Wow, thanks! That's the one. Funny how memory drift made it different in my head...but it has been many years. How did you find that? Now if someone can figure out the source, that would be even more amazing.
I believe it's in Vertigo Park And Other Tall Tales by Mark O'Donnell but it's appeared in the Spy magazine December 1987 before that.
If you search Google Books for "Do you not be happy with me as the translator of the books of you" and click on the Preview or Full View button you should see it in several places
What's remarkable is how good machine translation (DeepL, Google Translate) has become at handling idiomatic expressions in recent years. Still not perfect, of course (there's still the odd clanger), but anyone trying to do the same task today would fare considerably better.
I disagree. I can't speak for Deepl, but Google remains terrible at idioms. Give the phrase "There's mud all over the shop." a try.
The test sentence I usually use is “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”
Google EN->JP doesn’t get it right, and also oddly translates the two sentences into different politeness levels.
From the Wikipedia: > O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez , commonly known by the name English as She Is Spoke , is a 19th-century book written by Pedro Carolino, with some editions crediting José da Fonseca as a co-author. It was intended as a Portuguese–English conversational guide or phrase book. However, because the "English" translations provided are usually inaccurate or unidiomatic, it is regarded…
> "raining buckets" Really? Which part of the UK does that come from. Where I come from *Nort Wilts.) the related phrase would be "It's bucketing down!" but I've never heard anyone say "It's raining buckets!".