Idioms

I've always thought idiomatic English expressions were always a bit random. Sure, they usually make sense, with a few out-of-left-fielders, but for the most part they're relatively sane. For example, a shot in the dark is a random guess that you're making with very little to no prior knowledge. If someone is taking a shot in the dark, then they're making a haphazard guess about something completely outside their experience. This makes sense because, if you were to actually shoot a gun in a dark place, you could hit a puppy or a child, and then people would wonder why you're senselessly brandishing a firearm in a dark room full of cute things that really don't handle bullets very well. That actually doesn't do anything to prove why it makes sense. Moving on.

My wildly irresponsible guess work ended in disaster. For the love of God, don't turn on the lights.

As another example, shooting fish in a barrel is a relatively easy thing to do. Fish don't generally do much outside of water, and if they're trapped in a barrel, they are limited to twitching and the occasional gasp for breath. This makes it fairly easy for you and your gun-toting self to senselessly blow them to little fish chunks and back to whatever aquatic god(s) they believe in. So the phrase easy as shooting fish in a barrel makes sense because it's relating the ease of your current task with that of slaughtering Nemo and all of his friends and family. 

That gimpy fin isn't a birth defect, it's a God damn war wound.

The point is, I've always thought English idioms were a little odd. I usually wonder what must pass through other peoples' minds when they're unfamiliar with English and they hear some of our quaint little expressions for the first time. 

Until the other week, when I was Skyping with a friend of mine who lives in France. I had informed him that I had gotten a new guitar for Christmas, and he jokingly replied "ca dechire sa tante la cochone qui mange des frites le mardi!" 

When I saw the sentence for the first time, I got a little confused and asked him for a translation, because I didn't think I was reading it right. I awaited his reply, slowly trying to puzzle out the sentence. He replied "that's as cool as your aunt the whore who eats fries on Tuesdays."

It was at that moment that I decided American idioms really weren't that bad. And the French, just like in every other story they're ever involved in, proved without a doubt that they're irrevocably insane.

Marlin was horrified to see, on returning from his vacation, a slutty middle aged woman dining on all his friends and family in the form of fish fries while she used a darkened daycare center as a firing range to shoot children whom she had trapped in a barrel