For no reason at all, please give me your favourite cow-related figures of speech!
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@sundogplanets Eine Kuh macht Muh, viele Kühe machen Mühe
(hard to translate German pun, roughly "one cow says moo, many cows create mooch work")@Tom_ofB @sundogplanets
Wow, excellent translation! Congrats!(Until a few seconds ago, I would have considered this utterly untranslateable.)
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@sundogplanets
Is fearr an tsláinte mhór ná na milte bó.Good health is better than lots of cattle
@sundogplanets
Is deacair adharca a chur ar bhó mhaol.Literally "It's hard to put horns on a hornless cow", a version of "You can't teach an old dog new tricks"
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@jonoleth @sundogplanets In Danish we seem to have dropped the last half of that, so we just have "there's no cow on the ice" = "don't worry". I had no idea there was a longer version that actually made sense

@toke @sundogplanets "ingen ko på isen" is the normal Swedish saying too, I just enjoy the archaic version more

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– 'Nearly' never bulled a cow
– As useful as tits on a bull
– To every cow its calf, to every book its copy. (A copyright ruling by King Diarmait mac Cerbaill in Ireland circa CE 561)
– He has his own cow in the ditch (Finnish: He is putting his own interests over those of the community)
– There won't be a cow milked in [place] tonight (Ireland: People in that place will be too busy celebrating their team's win)
Unpleasant but trenchant:
"that lad is about as useful as a blind tit on a dead heifer"
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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 "el que se quema con leche, ve una vaca y llora".
"he who gets burned with milk, starts crying when they see a cow".
Meaning people become more sensitive/alert/careful when they see the first symptoms of a very bad past experience.
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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)
If a food was overly salty, my dad would sometimes mutter "someone got mastitis?", as mastitis in our cows could lead to salty-tasting milk.
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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 French we say "la vache!" (literally "the cow!") to mean "wow!". I don't know why.
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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 These are SMALL. But the ones out there are FAR AWAY.
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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 Will calves do? In Danish "som skidt fra en spædekalv". Like shit from a newborn calf.
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/idiom/som-skidt-fra-en-spaedekalv -
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)
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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 Many French phrases with cows, most of them unflatteting (for the cows, I mean).
"To talk like a spanish cow" -> to be unable to talk properly (probably "basque espagnol" was transmuted into "vache espagnole")
We don't say "pigs", but "cows" for cops (this one comes from German : Wache -> vache). Lots of "death to the cows" graffiti around.
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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)
here is a fun idiom: "milking a dead cow". used to describe continued investments into bitcoin and ai.
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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 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
Is deacair adharca a chur ar bhó mhaol.Literally "It's hard to put horns on a hornless cow", a version of "You can't teach an old dog new tricks"
@sundogplanets Cows feature a lot in Irish folklore - the Irish word for "road" is "bóthar" which comes from the word for "cow", "bó", because the first roads were used for driving cows.
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@sundogplanets These are SMALL. But the ones out there are FAR AWAY.
@steve199nwep I use this skit in my astronomy classes all the time to talk about astronomers trying to learn about other galaxies!
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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 That's richer than 6' up a bulls ass. Rich in this context meaning rich in nutrients, as in high quality bullshit.
A blivott.
It was used by my redneck kin as shorthand for anything packed so tightly as to be coming out at the seams. But when I asked what it was as a kid the response I got was: 10 lbs. of manure in a 5 lb. bag,
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@sundogplanets dutch:
De koe bij de horens vatten.@ReneDamkot @sundogplanets also from nl: achteraf kijk je de koe in de kont (lit. after the fact, all there's left to see is the cow's ass, meaning something like no crying over spilled milk)
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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)
All hat and no cattle.
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@sundogplanets Irish seanfhocal (literally: oldword - means proverb or old phrase) about cows.
Bíonn adharca fada ar na ba thar lear - There are long horns on the cows overseas - Sort of like far away hills are green - they've got bigger cows over there!@shivers @sundogplanets sounds a bit like "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence."
Which is probably another one. -
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
probably not exactly what you are looking at, but my mind immediately saw the Simpsons"Don't have a cow, man!" is a famous catchphrase from Bart Simpson
and a compilation of Bart saying it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3sdZw1gThE