One I’ve always liked…
The early bird gets the worm -
But the early worm gets eaten.
On not shitting where you eat…
Seems straight forward to me - don’t make a mess of the place where you get your food.
The other one no-one’s mention yet -
“I wouldn’t spit on him if he was on fire”
And for something truley nonsensical …
“go arse over teakettle”
“Nature abhors a vacuum.”
Then why is way over 99% of the universe a pretty hard vacuum?
“I hate him so much I would never do anything that could help him - not even spit on him, if it happened to be at a time when that spit would be helpful.”
It’s piss, right?
“All that glitters is not gold” makes no sense. “Not all that glitters is gold” is the correct translation of the Latin original.
that’s taken out of context - earthworms are nocturnal so they’re actually being out late, having partied through the night.
“Have” comes off ambiguous in this expression, but the expression is pretty old. Replace the word “have” with “save” and it makes more sense, which is the original intent of the phrase.
You’ve got a lovely cake, it’s delightful, it’s fabulous. Now you can keep your cake and admire it, or you can cut it up and eat it. But you can’t do both.
I suppose you could take a video on your iphone, but that wouldn’t be the same thing.
What are you jabbering about? You’re making less sense than any of these idioms.
That phrase is not supposed to just mean “look who showed up”, but rather “My, you look like you’ve been worked over pretty harsh.”
What? You have a bird in the hand. There are two over there in the bush that you would have to try to catch. The one in the hand is better because you already have it.
That idiom doesn’t say anything about having a lever.
Personally, I’ve always assumed that idiom involved moving objects, sort of like getting caught between a hammer and an anvil. You’re not stuck, your smashed. YMMV.
Phrase arose from the days when horses were the means of transportation and chief source of power. Of course rich people had horses.
Yeah, why give in to that extortionist? Taking my friggin’ apples every day, he should get a real job.
However the Romans may have put it; I would respectfully disagree with you as regards the first version not making sense. I’ve always understood that that way of framing the general idea of “not everything / everyone with attribute A, also has attribute B”, is an acceptable alternative to your second version. The first way of putting it can seem – I’d say not nonsensical, but ambiguous; but by applying common sense, one can figure out the meaning from the context.
One can say, “not all people go to church”; or “all people don’t go to church”. It seems to me obvious enough, that the second version means the same as the first – “some do, others don’t”. It isn’t asserting that nobody attends church.
As for the “All that glitters…” quote in particular: if I have things rightly, Shakespeare is – as often --the original culprit. It’s the first line of a verse in one of his plays (IIRC, Shakespeare’s actual word here is “glisters”, not “glitters”). He needed to shape the line the way he did, to make it scan verse-wise.
You know what threw me off all the time. The saying, “never say never.” You’re saying never as you’re telling someone else to not say never! 
:smack:
Solved: Eat half the cake.
I thought that this is saying you’re looking at a river and it looks like the water isn’t moving, but that’s simply because it’s a deep river and the water is flowing more swiftly at the bottom.
Although…now that I think about it, does that actually happen in nature?
Maybe it’s more like shallow creeks run swiftly and splashily, but the more stately rivers (rivers with gravitas, if you will) may not be as quick and showy but they make up for it by being deep.
Here’s one I hate: “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
Forget the relative worthlessness of a penny, that’s not why this idiom bothers me. I just don’t understand it. If someone gives me a penny, did I earn it? What if I stole it? What if I worked for it? Now say I came across a penny in each of the aforementioned ways. Does the very virtue of saving each penny make each penny earned? No!!
So what the heck does this idiom even mean? I’ve always taken it to mean “It’s a good idea to save your pennies rather than spending them, because in the long run, saving even small amounts of money will add up over time.” But, how does “A penny saved is a penny earned” mean that?
When I was little I didn’t understand “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.”
That made no damn sense. Of course I want the Lord to be my shepherd, isn’t that what Sunday School is trying to teach me? Then my mom explained that it means “…I shall not want…anything else.”
I believe the expression refers to the fact that it’s easy to spend money, but takes some effort to put it away for later. Effort in the sense of planning and foresight and denial of immediate gratification. The effort will pay off in the long run, therefore you have earned that saved money, regardless of how you came by it. Perhaps when the expression was coined a penny was actually worth something, but I’ve always taken it as a euphemism for money in general.
No, because once you cut the cake, you have ruined the beauty and elegance that you wished to preserve.
“A penny thrown away recklessly is a penny you don’t have around to spend later.” From when pennies were worth something - halfpennies were worth something.
I hate it when I get poked through the ticking! It’s one of the worst places to get poked through.
This reminds me of Clark Gable’s immortalized line: “Frankly, my dear, I give a damn!”
I just play it safe and say “I don’t care” (especially if the person emphatically tells me that he didn’t kill his wife). (sorry for the mix-and-match movie quotes… by which I mean “not sorry”:p)
I find strange “How [do] you like them apples?” Why “them apples” instead of just “that”.
In more general terms it means “Don’t make a mess where your support comes from.” Don’t shit on your plate and then expect a pleasant meal. Don’t create drama at work and expect a pleasant work environment.
The implication is that you have more to fear from the silent dude in the back of the room than the obnoxious moron getting in your face but I think the actual correlation to water is that a stream or creek that makes a lot of noise and looks fast is easy to get in and out of and doesn’t really put you in danger. A larger river that looks like it’s moving slowly isn’t something you can wade through and the current, especially in the center may look slow but in reality can sweep you off your feet and half a mile down the river before anyone knows you’re gone.
I take this to mean that when it comes to money, you can either save it or earn it. Being smart with your money and not spending it foolishly is as good as going out and having to work for it.
“He’s second to none!” or “He’s second to no one!” - I always hear that as “How bad must a person be that, there’s no one involved in the event, and he Still came in second?”