For no reason at all, please give me your favourite cow-related figures of speech!
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@sundogplanets
Is fearr an tsláinte mhór ná na milte bó.Good health is better than lots of cattle
Dutch: "Geen oude koeien uit de sloot halen"
"Don't pull old cows out of the ditch."
i.e. Don't dredge up old and (almost) forgotten issues.
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For no reason at all, please give me your favourite cow-related figures of speech! (Stuff like "No use crying over spilled milk" or "until the cows come home", puns extremely welcome)
@sundogplanets in Brazil there's an expression "a vaca foi para o brejo" (the cow went to the marsh) which is used as an expletive to describe a situation that went very wrong; the implication being that once a cow gets into a marsh, you're not getting it out.
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@sundogplanets Mum brought me up on a rich diet of silly poems, including:
How does a brown cow
Make white milk
When it only eats green grass?
I don't know
And you don't know
And neither does the cow.
And when she's laying on her thickest Norn Iron (Northern Ireland) accent, one of her goto phrases is "How now, brown cow?" which comes out more like "Hoi noi broin coi?"@sundogplanets oh, I've just remembered another one!
When I was dawdling over something as a kid, she'd get frustrated and say, "We'll be here until the cows come home." -
For no reason at all, please give me your favourite cow-related figures of speech! (Stuff like "No use crying over spilled milk" or "until the cows come home", puns extremely welcome)
@sundogplanets "I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum."
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@Tom_ofB @sundogplanets another German one: "Die Kuh vom Eis holen." Moving the cow from the ice. the meaning is to solve a difficult but urgent problem.
@benni
Another German one (we seem to deal with cows a lot): "Du siehst aus wie / du schaust wie *eine Kuh auf Glatteis"
roughly "You look like a cow on black ice" (stressing the slippyness, not the optics)
@Tom_ofB @sundogplanets -
@amin @sundogplanets @skinnylatte there's actually a lot of YouTube videos of people playing music for cows because cows love live music.
This said, I bet it was this video
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@sundogplanets in French we say "la vache!" (literally "the cow!") to mean "wow!". I don't know why.
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@sundogplanets in Brazil there's an expression "a vaca foi para o brejo" (the cow went to the marsh) which is used as an expletive to describe a situation that went very wrong; the implication being that once a cow gets into a marsh, you're not getting it out.
@brunoph I am going to start using this one!!
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For no reason at all, please give me your favourite cow-related figures of speech! (Stuff like "No use crying over spilled milk" or "until the cows come home", puns extremely welcome)
In Spanish: "Tanto peca el que mata a la vaca como el que le agarra la pata"
The one who kills the cow sins as much as the one holding her leg.
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For no reason at all, please give me your favourite cow-related figures of speech! (Stuff like "No use crying over spilled milk" or "until the cows come home", puns extremely welcome)
@sundogplanets I learned a danish saying last summer: "There's no cow on the ice".
Alternatively "If the hind legs are on land, there's no cow on the ice". Meaning it's not a crisis yet. Based on farmers afraid of losing their cows, I guess!
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For no reason at all, please give me your favourite cow-related figures of speech! (Stuff like "No use crying over spilled milk" or "until the cows come home", puns extremely welcome)
@sundogplanets Mit Gewalt ist kein Bulle zu melken.
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@sundogplanets probably more but I have a meeting now
@sundogplanets "Je moet geen oude koeien uit de sloot halen," Rough translation: don't rescue an old cow from a ditch.
Basically it means that you should not bring up old grievances in current discussions.
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For no reason at all, please give me your favourite cow-related figures of speech! (Stuff like "No use crying over spilled milk" or "until the cows come home", puns extremely welcome)
@sundogplanets In the UK, the railways often try to make the reason for delays seem more complicated than they actually are. This a cow on the track can be described as a Bovine Incursion. https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/dwdhsk/the_reason_my_train_was_cancelled/
Which reminds me of a joke. A train is rattling along the tracks quite happily when there's a sudden lurch to one side followed by another back again. The passengers are all thrown about and asking the dazed conductor what just happened? He radios ahead to the driver and asks.
The driver responds "We just hit a cow"
Conductor "What? There was a cow on the track?"
Driver "No, but I got the bastard anyway" -
For no reason at all, please give me your favourite cow-related figures of speech! (Stuff like "No use crying over spilled milk" or "until the cows come home", puns extremely welcome)
“Kovending” → “Cow turn” (i.e., U-turn – literally or figuratively) 
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@sundogplanets "Je moet geen oude koeien uit de sloot halen," Rough translation: don't rescue an old cow from a ditch.
Basically it means that you should not bring up old grievances in current discussions.
@anna @sundogplanets and what about "achteraf kijk je de koe in de kont"
Afterwards, you look into the cow's ass. Meaning: after the fact, it's easy to see what should have happened. -
For no reason at all, please give me your favourite cow-related figures of speech! (Stuff like "No use crying over spilled milk" or "until the cows come home", puns extremely welcome)
@sundogplanets not sure whether it's relevant for your needs, but in italian “svaccato” (adj) means slumped or slouching, and comes from “vacca”, cow, like the corresponding reflexive verb “svaccarsi”
(“vacca” is the most proper Italian word for cow, used in technical contexts, but also has a derogative use, and thus in layman speech usually one uses “mucca”)
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For no reason at all, please give me your favourite cow-related figures of speech! (Stuff like "No use crying over spilled milk" or "until the cows come home", puns extremely welcome)
@sundogplanets As you're in Aotearoa, have you come through the famous town of Bulls? They've taken bovine puns to the next level. Not only is the entire town plastered with bull imagery and statues but there's heaps of punny signage, like 'udderly unbeliev-a-bull'. It's really quite a sight to behold.
This is their website: https://www.bulls.kiwi/ -
@sundogplanets "Je moet geen oude koeien uit de sloot halen," Rough translation: don't rescue an old cow from a ditch.
Basically it means that you should not bring up old grievances in current discussions.
@anna I'm getting a feeling that cows may be kinda important to the Dutch.
In Hindi, "come bull, hit me" is how you say "asking for trouble", and there's another saying that translates to "whose stick, their buffalo".
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For no reason at all, please give me your favourite cow-related figures of speech! (Stuff like "No use crying over spilled milk" or "until the cows come home", puns extremely welcome)
@sundogplanets
"Nem que a vaca tussa" it's Portuguese. It translates into something like "not even if the cow coughs"
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For no reason at all, please give me your favourite cow-related figures of speech! (Stuff like "No use crying over spilled milk" or "until the cows come home", puns extremely welcome)
Some Finnish sayings:
- Oma lehmä ojassa
- Ei niin pientä ojaa, etteikö sinne oma lehmä mahtuisi
- Kohta meissä kaikissa asuu pieni lehmäTranslations:
- My own cow in the ditch
- There is no ditch so small that there is no room for your own cow
- Soon there will be a little cow in all of us
