Please, please, please tell me it’s pronounced like newbie.
close, but not really. More like “neeyo bee”
I want an audio file for this one. Because I don’t speak Hebrew, and that is an awesome insult.
It comes from Aesop’s fables (ancient Greek). “Belling the Cat”. Everyone who’s language Aesop has been translated into will have an idiom based on “Belling the Cat”, as well as [continue your Aesop from here]…
A friend serving with the Peace Corps in Lesotho said the Sesotho phrase for a hard rain is “It’s raining old women with knobkierries.” More or less “It’s raining cats and dogs.” though the image of old women falling from the sky with the South African equivalent of shillelaghs makes me giggle.
**matt_mcl **and Hypnagogic Jerk posted all of mine. 
Except, maybe: passer la nuit sur la corde à linge (spend the night on the clothesline): can mean to have had a bad night, or simply be in bad shape.
That reminds me of more eating-related Spanish expressions:
Comer la cabeza. Eat the head. To brainwash someone.
Comer la oreja. Eat the ear. To talk someone’s ear off.
Edited to add a funny story about how I learned the first expression. When I was attending university in Spain, there were quite a few students my age who were nuns. I asked my roommates about this phenomenon, and their explanation was that these girls had attended Catholic school in their elementary years and the nuns there had “eaten their heads.” I pretty much got the idea, but the image of zombie nuns has stuck with me.
There is a charming book called “In Other Words” devoted to this phenomenon.
Some of my favourites - “dil baagh baagh ho giya” from Urdu, for overwhelming joy; literally, “my heart became a garden”.
And from German - “drachenfutter” - a gift like a box of chocolates husbands give to their irate wives if the husband has stayed out too late or otherwise behaved badly. It literally means “dragon-fodder”.
I like that. It’s even fun to say.
I don’t know that this idiom is all that hilarious, but I’ve always liked “buah bibir” in Indonesian, which translates literally to “fruit of the lips.” It means “gossip.”
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some commas I need to go fuck.
pelleteux de nuages: an airy-headed idealist, a builder of castles in the air. Literally “cloud-shoveller.”
It’s a waste of time - it’s (actually) the bee’s knees.
Why, who died? – You want me to do what?! (ETA – generally not sexual-activity related…)
Drive away, the keys are inside – It’s completely FUBAR-ed (this one comes from an old skit from our best-known comedy group; it’s just one example of the Hebrew equivalent of Pythonese.)
**Kyla **-- I think you’re mis-remembering a bit. “Lama? Kova!” (note the punctuation) – literally “Why? Hat!” – essentially means “Why? Because!”
ME? Misremember something? Unpossible!
p.s. Thanks for the correction.
IMHO, **It’s a waste of time **(Chaval al hazman) has almost the exact same meaning as “Forget about it”, as explained by Johnny Depp here.
A friend I met in California had lived with his parents who worked in Iran just before the revolution. He related to me an interesting insult translated from Farsi “May God fuck you”
I thought this was a creative insult.
As close as I can remember the phonetic pronunciation was
“Amunonkudom ahsoloshek”
IIRC from spending a year in then-Czechoslovakia, Do prdele! is used where native English speakers would normally say “Shit!” It translates literally as “Up to [your, my] ass!” (Presumably, we’re ass-deep in the shit.)
I had one female coworker in Beneshov ask me sotto voce if “Up to ass!” [sic] was proper English.
In Russian, “Fuck you!” is Poshol ty! The closest literal translation I can offer is “Get yourself onto a prick!” though only the verb and pronoun are mentioned.
I had another female coworker in Moscow ask me if she could say “Go to prick!” in English.
I know this post is three years old, but it’s the same idiom in Welsh: Mae hi’n bwrw hen wragedd a ffyn, “It’s raining old women with sticks.” Even more literally, “She’s throwing old women with sticks,” because “she [the weather] is throwing” is how you say it’s raining, snowing, etc.
In Russian, “not doing anything useful”, “jerking off” becomes “whacking pears with my prick.”
In Russian, zayebat (literally, “to fuck beyond all limits”) means to make someone thoroughly sick and tired of something; zayebatsya is the same verb applied to oneself (“I’m sick and tired [of you].”)
In Moscow on the Hudson, when Robin Williams is complaining about his shoes not fitting, the KGB agent (who really was Russian) ad libbed Menya zaebali vashi chertoviye botinki! (“I’m fucking sick and tired of [hearing about] your goddamned shoes!”)
Old thread, but Manolo must be referring to [Manolo Sanlúcar](Manolo Sanlúcar) or Manolo Franco - both famous flamenco guitarists.
Franco did some instructional learn-to-play videos that would put him in the similar league with Bob Ross teaching painting.