Eating the Leaf
Sunday November 30, 2008
A community member of the About.com Italian Language Forums lists a number of idiomatic Italian phrases that defy transliteration. Italian dictionaries won't help much in rendering meaning to such sayings as: mangiare la foglia ("to eat the leaf," i.e. to smell a rat), avere la luna di traverso ("to have the moon sideways," i.e. to be in a bad mood), and fare la cresta sulla spesa ("make the crest on shopping," i.e. to spend less than stated and pocket the difference).
Comments
w/ the economy in a shambles as it is now, gli americani devono fare la cresta sulla spesa! every language has it’s own untranslatable idioms. when i was teaching ESL, it was very difficult to explain american idioms to foreign students. while we americans used & understood them, the non-english speakers found it impossible…well, even english speakers from other countries often don’t catch the meaning. of course, i consider the “american language” to be separate & distinct from the english spoken in great britan. {my opinion}. one funny little idiom that most of the vietnamese students seemed to understand was: “when your number is up, you die”. many ESL students speak a limited amount of english but they want to perfect it & learn as many of the slang & idiomatic expressions as possible. i think that most people learning a language have that as an eventual goal. the best..M
c’mon “posters”, let’s hear from all of you on this subject…it’s fun!
Fare la cresta sulla spesa = To skim off a few coins for yourself when you’re charged with buying food or household essentials for somebody else. A servant could have done that when servants were still extant.
Also, “mangiare la foglia” means “to see through some deceitful behavior”, not “to smell a rat” which is “sentire puzza di bruciato”, ie to have a sensation that something’s wrong without actually being able to point out what.