“A watched pot never boils.”
Well if you apply enough heat to it, it will in fact boil. You watching it will not prevent this.
Actually as Andrew Tobias in The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need points out, if you save a penny your wealth increases by one cent.
But, thanks to taxes, you have to earn more than a penny to increase your wealth by one cent.
So its often better to save (look for deals), then to try an earn more to build up your wealth.
So the saying means, saving a penny (getting a better deal) is just like earning a penny (and in fact, thanks to taxes… its better).
Oh wow, thanks for trying to explain this idiom to me. So “a penny saved” in this context means that you paid a penny less for something than you otherwise would have, and NOT that you put a penny in the penny bank.
I think I get it now! A penny saved by getting a good deal is just as good as a penny you earned and added to your wealth. Phew. I’m happy again.
“Awesome"vs. Äwful”. These expressions should mean the same thing, but are opposite. Why is this?
You wasted perhaps the only opportunity you will ever get to say “irregardless” with impunity. Just sayin.
The solution is patently obvious, as Gatopescado notes: Eat half the cake. Then you do have your cake and you’ve eaten it, too.
I’ve always taken “I could care less” to have an unspoken addendum of “… but that would require me to muster up the energy to do so and, given the irrelevance/lack of interest this matter holds, I am unwilling to do so, as that would - ironically - require me to care about this matter enough to be bothered doing that.”
Another I’ve heard that I wonder about: “A bird in he hand is worth two in the bush.” I ‘get’ it means (effectively) “something is better than nothing”, but I struggle to think of a plausible situation whereby having a bird in my hand would be an immensely advantageous or desireable situation - much less one where two birds would be an improvement.*
*I realise this probably dates from an era where having a bird in your hand meant you were actually going to have something to eat that night, but even so, it doesn’t make a lot of sense nowadays.
It’s funny because I was just explaining the idiom “bird in the hand” to my boyfriend not more than 2 days ago. I too struggled to come up with a good example, but just settled on saying something like, “It’s better to appreciate what you’ve got in your possession right now than it is to possibly lose it for a chance to get even more of that good thing.”
Still couldn’t come up with a real world example of when I would say it though, that wasn’t totally lame sounding.
This is new to me. I have never seen this definition attached to the saying. Honestly, you’re overthinking it a bit. A simple Google search reveals the meaning of the phrase, such as this one from wisegeek.org:
A penny saved typically refers to the full quote “a penny saved is a penny earned.” This old adage is a little challenging to understand, since people can’t earn the same penny twice. It does relate to the idea of the difficulty in being thrifty and saving money. Spending a penny, or any other amount, means the person no longer has it in his possession, while saving it means he can still count it as something earned and something held.
Another way of interpreting this maxim is to say that saving is work too. Saving is another form of earning, because it may take effort not spend the penny. In a sense, the person who saves does work twice for the penny, once to initially earn it, and then again to keep from spending it. Alternately, a penny in a savings account may earn money, granted at a very slow rate. This meaning may not have been intended with initial use of the phrase.
When I talk to new sales people I like to use this idiom -
the sale you’ve made, is worth a whole hell of a lot more than the one you haven’t -
Or to put it another way - take the money that’s on offer first, make it safe and secure and THEN work on the “two in the bush” - if you give up the bird in the hand, to chase the two in bush, you may well end up shit outta luck.
Think of it in terms of a sale -
let’s say you’ve been looking for a new laptop - then you see one on sale for 40% discount.
Do you buy it, or wait for another sale that is 60% discount?
Well - a bird in the hand (40% discount) is worth two in the bush (the 60% discount that might never eventuate)
Ahhh…so my grandfather was actually slut shaming the earthworm for partying too much? 
Yes, it does, both in rivers and seas. The top layer may look sluggish, but the undercurrents are fast and drag you down.
Huh, interesting… the Spanish translations specify the “for nothing”. El Señor es mi pastor, nada me puede faltar - the Lord is my shepherd, I can lack for nothing.
when you’re in a happy relationship you do not risk it for a night with the hot twins in the bush, for you might just end up being eaten by a bird.
Upthread Superhal took issue with “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” on the basis that life had better give you sugar as well otherwise it’s going to taste like shit.
Good point, but I have another issue with the saying, namely that it prevaricates on the nature of lemons. The implication is that if life gives you something sour (ie bad, useless), you should be enterprising and make something better from what you are given. But the saying only works because lemons are not something bad or useless: they may be sour, but they are a valuable, nutritious and tasty fruit. That’s why you can make lemonade out of them.
To make the saying more realistic, it would have to be either:
When life gives you something valuable like lemons, you’ll be able to make even more money by turning it into lemonade. Isn’t it great to be born into wealth?"
…or alternatively, to be brutally honest, the saying could be:
“When life gives you something useless and valueless, you won’t actually be able to make much out of it, sorry. Sucks to be you, I guess.”
I suspect that neither, more realistic, version of the saying would suit the rhetorical purposes of the sort of smug wanker who tends to use the original version.
The one that always got me is “I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know about this.”
First time I heard one guy say that to another, I thought “So, what, he’s sixty percent knowledgeable, and well on his way to seventy – and you used to be a hundred percent, but have dropped down to twenty? Or he’s topped out at ninety-five percent, while you’ve gone from ninety-nine to zero? Exactly how stupid are you these days, compared to how brainy you used to be?”
“When life gives you AIDS, make lemon-AIDS!”
- Sarah Silverman
So you can halve your cake and eat it too.
“A stitch in time saves nine.” No idea. My guess would be something to do with Borg dressmaking. “Stitch 7 of 9 completed. Other stitches need not be assimilated.”
Well, yes, but: The cross-sectional area of a deep reach is larger than the cross-sectional area of a shallow reach. So the same volume of water is running faster through the shallow spots, and slower through the deeper spots. If it doesn’t run faster it will bank up until there is a slope, then run faster down the slope. If it doesn’t run slower, the slope/fall will flatten out until there is no no slope.
So water runs slower and flatter through the deep spots, and faster and steaper through the shallow spots. You can see this at the top and bottom of any still reach: there will be a fast slope running into the pond, and a fast slope running out of it.
It’s like you do 100mph in a single lane, then everybody crowds up to do 30mph for some inane reason, then you all speed up again to 100mph. Only the reason you all slow down is because you can, not because you have to. And the reason you can all slow down is because the road has widened out, so the car behind you can go beside you instead of behind you, and you aren’t trapped in tranch of cars all going 100mph and afraid to slow down. Then the road narrows again and you speed up to the speed of traffic to get into the single lane, with the other cars cutting in front of you and behind you at full speed.
Anyway, it means that the slow flat reaches of a river are deep, and are not a good place to cross. If you want a good place to cross, go to a ford, where you see the water speeding accross the shallow river bottom.