Hi everyone,
I’m new to this forum, which I discovered while wandering around the Internet looking for equivalents of French idioms.
I actually came across this thread, which helped me find equivalents in many other languages for the idiom “poule mouillée” (coward/chicken): Non-English Colloquialisms For A Chicken (someone who is fearful/easily frightened)?
That convinced me that the best way to discover equivalent idioms in other languages was to join this forum.
A little about me:
I’m a French photographer with a passion for LEGO minifigures, miniatures, and wordplay.
When I combine all those interests, I get my favorite project: photographing French idioms using LEGO figurines in creative scenes.
I use these photos to make people guess which idiom the image represents.
Since I believe we learn best when having fun, I also share short notes about the origins of each idiom and try to provide equivalents in other languages.
I’m fairly comfortable in English and Spanish, so I can do some research in those languages, but I’m not always confident when it comes to checking equivalents in others.
So I’d love for you to help me find equivalents of the following idiom in your own language.
Let’s start with this one:
“Avoir des yeux de lynx” (literally “to have lynx eyes”), equivalent to “eagle-eyed” in English — meaning to have very sharp vision or a keen eye for detail.
The Greek phrase is oφθαλμοί Λυγκέως (ofthalmoi Lynceus), which means “eyes of Lynceus”.
In Greek mythology, Lynceus was one of the Argonauts and had famously good vision. He could see through walls, tree, the ground, etc. Lynceus served as the lookout on the Argo (Jason and the Argonaut’s ship).
In many different European countries, confusion over the name Lynceus and the animal “lynx” led to the phrase being corrupted as having the “eyes of a lynx”.
Google’s bullshit generator lists these as the equivalent in other European languages:
French:Avoir un œil de lynx (to have an eye of a lynx)
Spanish:Tener ojos de lince (to have eyes of a lynx)
Italian:Occhi di lince (eyes of a lynx)
German:Scharfsichtig (sharp-sighted) or luchsaugen
What you (and everyone else) can do is upload your photos to any image sharing site, make sure your security settings there are configured so anyone can see the pic, then include the url of the pic in your post here.
Imgur has recently decided to not allow non-US people to see pix posted there, so most of us have switched to using ImgBB.
See here for more:
The thread is titled about Imgur, but ends up treating other hosting sites too.
“Eyes like a lynx” also existed in American English at least as far back as the 1700s, although it started fading from usage in the early 20th century.
Thanks for leading me to this thread, that is indeed something I like, not to mention my avatar and my name. I will put it in “Watching” and keep a lynx’ eye on it, but the main question has already been correctly answered by engineer_comp_geek (for the languages I know, he has been corrected for Dutch) and by EinsteinsHund. Slight nitpick for engineer: where he claims that in Spanish we say Tener ojos de lince (to have eyes of a lynx) the expression I know is rather tener vista de lince (to have a lynx’ vision).
Expressions are very often related to vision, but seldom to hearing. I can’t think of any expression in German about hearing, can you? Ein Gehör wie… ja, wie was? I can’t think of a Spanish example either. And English? He has the hearing of a … a what? Smelling? Like a dog, a sleuth, a truffle pig. Tick Taste? More difficult, but we at least have bocatto di cardinale in Spanish (which is dog’s Italian, Italians don’t like it).
He can always put it in his profile, that is foreseen. There is a field for it, so it can’t be forbidden.
Of course that will blow up his anonymity, but that’s up to him.
Dogs are almost always the animal associated with a good sense of smell (maybe also sharks, but scent in the water isn’t really the same thing as scent in air), and they have at least some association with hearing (see, for instance, a “dog whistle”, which only dogs (and a lot of other animals that don’t get in the metaphor) can hear). I suppose that if I were to associate any animal with especially sharp hearing, though, it’d be a bat? But you’re right that there don’t seem to be as many animal metaphors for hearing as for other senses.
Very good assuming that bats have one of the best hearing senses we know of, but the problem is: since when do we know it? Linguistic expressions tend to be ancient or ephemeral fads. Hearing like a bat does not fit into either category:
Eighty years is nothing! But too long for a fad.
Of course I don’t want to negate Lazzaro Spallanzani’s much earlier contribution to this field, despite his surgically removing the eyes of a bat to prove that it did not rely on vision to fly is something which we might anachronistically (ha! your nick fits in this thread too!) describe as animal cruelty today. This is the relevant section of his wikiarticle:
Back to the main point: our metaphors skew heavily towards vision. No taste, some smell, can’t think of any hearing (but there should be!), and no sense of touch at all, can’t even imagine where to start with that, apart from the Mimose (German) or mimosa (Spanish) or Mimosa pudica (Latin). English? Well, it is not even an animal, but only a plant. Irrelevant.
The dog whistle was a good idea too, but that we also only know since we are aware of ultrasounds, which is probably related to microphones and recording, so I guess not much more than a century. If I had to choose whether we know of ultrasounds longer that UV and / or IR or not I would guess UV and IR were discovered first. But electromagnetic radiation in turn is your field of expertise, so I suppose you are going to correct me again.
I think that dog whistles, themselves, have existed for more than a century. And it probably wasn’t hard to extrapolate the existence of ultrasound, since even among humans, the range of audible frequencies varies. If I can hear high-pitched sounds that Grandpa can’t, then maybe someone (or something) with really good hearing can hear even higher-pitched sounds that I can’t.
But for what it’s worth, infrared was discovered in 1800, and ultraviolet the next year. In both cases, it was produced by a prism in sunlight (which also produces invisible bands in addition to the visible colors), for infrared, via a thermometer, and for ultraviolet, via the chemicals used in photographic film.
Taste? More difficult, but we at least have bocatto di cardinale in Spanish (which is dog’s Italian, Italians don’t like it).