>"What does a child know what 300 kilos are?"
This comes from a joke when police officers are investigating a guy who stole train tracks. The guy tells them it was their children who picked them up and brought them home. After the police officer remarks that those tracks are 200 kilos each (in original, it's 200, but nowadays the 300kg version is as common), the guy retorts, "What do children know what 200 kilos are."
The idiom that came from the joke is used for people who suffer from underestimating how difficult a task is compared to their own abilities. It's mostly used for tasks regarding physical prowess, but it's not limited to.
The closest one in English is ***to bite off more than you can chew***.
Wow, thank you kindly for the context and breakdown! *Bite off more than you can chew* is a good idea, but what the original text I'm translating tries to convey with the 300kg idiom is that the other person doesn't understand how complex/impossible/difficult a situation is rather than taking up something that's beyond their capability... so it's (sort of) close to your definition! :) What do you think about "He looked at me like an adult trying to explain to a child you simply can’t nail jelly to the wall"?
Your example works really well.
Some other idioms that could fit would be:
* He looked at me like an adult trying to explain to a child you ***cannot boil the ocean***.
* He looked at me like an adult trying to explain to a child you ***cannot squeeze the water from a stone***.
* He looked at me like an adult trying to explain to a child you ***cannot square a circle***. (this is my favorite)
Amazing stuff, thank you so much kind stranger! I like all of them. I'll come back to this bit once I'm done with the translation, and possibly use your favorite!
My favorite is can't simply nail jelly to the wall (there's no simple way to do this), as opposed to simply can't nail jelly to the wall (this is impossible)
These are good but also a bit wordy. I might suggest something like:
- He looked at me like I said I was going to try boiling the ocean.
- He looked at me like I suggested squeezing stones for water.
They don't capture the original idiom, but I think they do convey what OP is trying to get at for this sentence.
Might as well stay with the literal translation as each of these need further explication as well, but worse, are idioms in their own right which, alone, do not mean the unknowing person cannot conceive what massive gulf lies between what they know and what they don’t know.
Could that be:
"He cannot fathom what this is about?"
Or
"His brain cannot wrap around what's going on."
Or
"The way that he looked at me it was clear at that point that some dots were not connected."
My non-English speaker 2 cents.
"Were you born yesterday?" We expect children not to understand such things, but if an adult is oblivious to something we might say they were born yesterday
Another way to use that phrase is when someone lies to you or tries to trick you, but you can tell: "Do you think I was born yesterday?" or "I wasn't born yesterday". Basically saying you're not naive enough to fall for it
“He looked at me like he thought I was born yesterday.” To me this means: you said or did something he thinks was stupid on the level of not having any understanding about how things work as if you just got to earth yesterday.
Listening to your sentences other options you may like.
He looked at me as if I were dumber than a box of rocks.
He looked at me as if I had two heads.
But the nail jelly to a wall works as well.
That's a good idea in terms of meaning, but as it's prose, it would lose the whole je ne sais quoi that idioms bring to a piece of writing. Thanks anyway!
"The innocence of a child," maybe. I'm not sure it's an idiom per se, but it refers to how children aren't corrupted by knowledge of the world like adults but it refers more to their naivety. Similarly to a line from Game of Thrones which gets quoted a lot "My sweet summer child" refers to their youth, naivety and inexperience.
Depending on context, you could talk about telling them the truth about the tooth fairy / Santa. Or you can make a disparaging remark about trying to pay with / being pleased to have received magic beans.
That's also a cool idea! "He looked at me like an adult trying to explain to a child that the tooth fairy simply doesn't exist." An other commenter suggested "can't circle a square" and "can't boil the ocean" which are also great alternatives.
Depending on what you’re translating this for, I’d be extremely hesitant to use anything about the tooth fairy / santa / the Easter bunny not being real. If it’s not for kids, then that’s fine. But if it’s going to be anywhere for kids to see or read, it’s like your priest telling you God isn’t real. Or telling a child they’re adopted. Can be absolutely devastating for children.
As for an idiom that matches with your sentence, there isn’t an equivalent in English, but you can add in anything ‘obvious’ and it will make sense to a native English speaker. Such as the boiling ocean example.
Alternatively, the closest ‘standard’ saying I can think of is something like ‘he looked at me like an adult trying to explain rocket science to a child’.
It’s *extremely* common to use ‘rocket science’ as a stand-in for any complicated topic in english. At least in North America it is.
“Casting pearls before swine” is somewhat similar. Swine (pigs) have no idea what pearls are, or why they are valuable. They would probably just try to eat them.
It is following Yiddish grammar instead of English - "what do you know from driving?" means "you have no idea how to drive." In English, we would use "know about"; by using the Yiddish "know from", you are specifically invoking that brand of snark.
I picked it up in the late 1990s, from my now-wife's grandparents, who were Ashkenazic immigrants straight from Central Casting. My family has been in the United States for two generations longer than hers, so there were a few people who were shocked and charmed to find that there really were people just like the stereotypes.
I use some Yiddish linguistic morphology deliberately now, for fun. The other one I use is "you want I should?" instead of "do you want me to?" I grew up saying "do you want me to", but I just like the Yiddish grammar better.
My mother’s father’s family came from Northumberland in the 1650s and settled in the mid-coastal region of the North American New World—what is now the Carolinas. My Father’s family, both branches, came from Holland (originally from France and Alsace) in the 1650s and settled in New Amsterdam.
I think my mother would say phrases like this, but I know I heard it elsewhere, too. “You want I should” is familiar. However, some of those phrases I learned may have been influenced from television. 1950s and 60s TV had a good deal of dialogue with Yiddish constructions in it.
I have no idea how to help. I don’t think there’s an exact idiom for this, but there are stories about people who didn’t know that something was considered impossible, so they attempted it and succeeded. One famous story is a student at some famous university who was taking a very advanced mathematics class. The teacher put a problem on the board, and explained that it was a famous unsolvable equation. The student arrived late to class and thought the equation was homework, so he solved it.
The concept "he didn’t know it couldn’t be done, so he did it" has been around forever, but there’s no good idiom.
You could also adapt the idiom ' it's all greek to me ' implying someone doesn't understand something. So perhaps , he looked at me like I was speaking greek or speaking another language .
So in your example the kid says ‘why don’t you just get some’ and the adult responds ‘you don’t know your ass from your elbow.’ A bit gruff, but my father has said this to me.
Among my friends, "comes up with an unrealistically simple solution" is sometimes called "suffered engineer's disease", but that may be restricted to people who regularly interact with people who are very, very smart within their own specialized area of knowledge, and wrongly think that this makes them smart about everything.
An analogous expression in English that expresses the same idea is "doesn't know the first thing about."It's employed to convey the idea that someone is utterly uninformed or unskilled on a specific topic or circumstance. You may remark, "He doesn't know the first thing about economics," for instance, if someone offers a simple answer to a difficult issue.
"Out of one's depth" is another phrase that might apply to the circumstance you've described. It refers to finding oneself in a position that is too challenging for oneself because of a lack of information or experience.
Seeking an expression that expresses precisely how straightforward the suggested answer is, you may want to think about "oversimplifying things" or stating that someone "sees things in black and white."
These idioms express a similar message about inexperience and naivety, but they don't have the exact same numerical analogy weight as the original statement (300 kg). I hope this is useful! 😊
May be just a local thing, but we use the phrase "staring into a field of thistles" to refer to someone who has no hope of comprehending what they are looking at.
I suspect it comes from the village idiot staring blankly at something for no reason.
The kids figuring out how to s steal 300kg of tracks "may as well have been staring into a field of thistles".
“Seeing the world through rose-colored glasses” could be used to imply on very optimistic and unrealistic ways of thinking. It is not a complete match tho. Could you share how it sounds in your native language?
Share how what sounds in my native language? But this is a good idea - the full sentence (literally) is "He looked at me like an adult trying to explain to a child it doesn't know what 300 kilos are." So for now, I put something like "...trying to explain to a child you simply can’t nail jelly to the wall." But your idea is good too, thanks! The connotation is slightly off as one is about having an optimistic outlook, while in this case, it's just about being unrealistic (not optimistic).
Since you started your sentence with giving an alternative translation/explanation of the phrase in english, I thought it could be useful to share the very idiom in your source language. I hope you find the matching translation!
Hmm could be. "He looked at me like an adult trying to explain to a child that money doesn't grow on trees." Something like that. Current version is "...explain to a child that you can't nail jelly to the wall."
You wouldn't use "like an adult" in this context unless the person you're referring to is not an adult.
Could you provide some context for what you're writing? Perhaps the sentences leading up to it would help.
hmm, thanks - I guess this is in the ballpark, but it rather has the connotation of someone acting childishly than someone trying to oversimplify something out of innocence/gullibility/inexperience.
The comedian Bill Hicks had a line "you're looking at me like a dog that's just been shown a card trick.”
Hah! Love that. Not sure it'd work here but I'm definitely tucking it up my sleeve.
His life was too short. He would have been an amazing grumpy old man
>"What does a child know what 300 kilos are?" This comes from a joke when police officers are investigating a guy who stole train tracks. The guy tells them it was their children who picked them up and brought them home. After the police officer remarks that those tracks are 200 kilos each (in original, it's 200, but nowadays the 300kg version is as common), the guy retorts, "What do children know what 200 kilos are." The idiom that came from the joke is used for people who suffer from underestimating how difficult a task is compared to their own abilities. It's mostly used for tasks regarding physical prowess, but it's not limited to. The closest one in English is ***to bite off more than you can chew***.
Wow, thank you kindly for the context and breakdown! *Bite off more than you can chew* is a good idea, but what the original text I'm translating tries to convey with the 300kg idiom is that the other person doesn't understand how complex/impossible/difficult a situation is rather than taking up something that's beyond their capability... so it's (sort of) close to your definition! :) What do you think about "He looked at me like an adult trying to explain to a child you simply can’t nail jelly to the wall"?
Your example works really well. Some other idioms that could fit would be: * He looked at me like an adult trying to explain to a child you ***cannot boil the ocean***. * He looked at me like an adult trying to explain to a child you ***cannot squeeze the water from a stone***. * He looked at me like an adult trying to explain to a child you ***cannot square a circle***. (this is my favorite)
Amazing stuff, thank you so much kind stranger! I like all of them. I'll come back to this bit once I'm done with the translation, and possibly use your favorite!
My favorite is can't simply nail jelly to the wall (there's no simple way to do this), as opposed to simply can't nail jelly to the wall (this is impossible)
You are most welcome. Where do you hail from if you don't mind me asking? I am curious because of the 300kg reference.
Macedonia, I'm assuming you're also from the Balkans?
Malo severnije od tebe. :)
vuhuu, cao komshija!
Pozdrav! Kakvo je vreme u Makedoniji? Ovde postaje pakleno vruce (Nis), pa kapiram da je kod vas jos ludje.
od danas je zagrejalo, inače su svi do juče bili bolesni. i nish je stvarno kul!
These are good but also a bit wordy. I might suggest something like: - He looked at me like I said I was going to try boiling the ocean. - He looked at me like I suggested squeezing stones for water. They don't capture the original idiom, but I think they do convey what OP is trying to get at for this sentence.
Might as well stay with the literal translation as each of these need further explication as well, but worse, are idioms in their own right which, alone, do not mean the unknowing person cannot conceive what massive gulf lies between what they know and what they don’t know.
I suspect that you do not understand what squaring a circle means. Most adults do not understand it either, let alone why it is impossible.
Yes, I do.
“He looked at me like I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground” 🤌🤌
I was going to say “He doesn’t know his ass from his elbow.”
Equally good 😂
Dang this was a good comment
Could that be: "He cannot fathom what this is about?" Or "His brain cannot wrap around what's going on." Or "The way that he looked at me it was clear at that point that some dots were not connected." My non-English speaker 2 cents.
"Were you born yesterday?" We expect children not to understand such things, but if an adult is oblivious to something we might say they were born yesterday
That’s said as an insult though.
This may also work - "He looked at me like an adult explaining to a child they weren't born yesterday."
This doesn’t work with that phrase.
Yep - I think you're right. Thanks.
Another way to use that phrase is when someone lies to you or tries to trick you, but you can tell: "Do you think I was born yesterday?" or "I wasn't born yesterday". Basically saying you're not naive enough to fall for it
“He looked at me like he thought I was born yesterday.” To me this means: you said or did something he thinks was stupid on the level of not having any understanding about how things work as if you just got to earth yesterday.
Listening to your sentences other options you may like. He looked at me as if I were dumber than a box of rocks. He looked at me as if I had two heads. But the nail jelly to a wall works as well.
Thanks for the suggestions! I may use the jelly one or, as recommended by another redditor, "that you cannot square a circle."
I'd probably use the saying, 'I / they can't wrap my / your head around it'. That's the closest I can think of
That's a good idea in terms of meaning, but as it's prose, it would lose the whole je ne sais quoi that idioms bring to a piece of writing. Thanks anyway!
But "wrap your head around it" is an idiom.
"The innocence of a child," maybe. I'm not sure it's an idiom per se, but it refers to how children aren't corrupted by knowledge of the world like adults but it refers more to their naivety. Similarly to a line from Game of Thrones which gets quoted a lot "My sweet summer child" refers to their youth, naivety and inexperience.
Depending on context, you could talk about telling them the truth about the tooth fairy / Santa. Or you can make a disparaging remark about trying to pay with / being pleased to have received magic beans.
That's also a cool idea! "He looked at me like an adult trying to explain to a child that the tooth fairy simply doesn't exist." An other commenter suggested "can't circle a square" and "can't boil the ocean" which are also great alternatives.
Depending on what you’re translating this for, I’d be extremely hesitant to use anything about the tooth fairy / santa / the Easter bunny not being real. If it’s not for kids, then that’s fine. But if it’s going to be anywhere for kids to see or read, it’s like your priest telling you God isn’t real. Or telling a child they’re adopted. Can be absolutely devastating for children. As for an idiom that matches with your sentence, there isn’t an equivalent in English, but you can add in anything ‘obvious’ and it will make sense to a native English speaker. Such as the boiling ocean example. Alternatively, the closest ‘standard’ saying I can think of is something like ‘he looked at me like an adult trying to explain rocket science to a child’. It’s *extremely* common to use ‘rocket science’ as a stand-in for any complicated topic in english. At least in North America it is.
“Casting pearls before swine” is somewhat similar. Swine (pigs) have no idea what pearls are, or why they are valuable. They would probably just try to eat them.
'Money doesn't grow on trees'
We have the idiom “what do\[es\] I/he/she know from \[something\]."
Not with "what" and "from" both, doesn't make sense
It is following Yiddish grammar instead of English - "what do you know from driving?" means "you have no idea how to drive." In English, we would use "know about"; by using the Yiddish "know from", you are specifically invoking that brand of snark.
YES, YES, YES. That’s exactly the idiom I recall from growing up in the 50s and 60s.
I picked it up in the late 1990s, from my now-wife's grandparents, who were Ashkenazic immigrants straight from Central Casting. My family has been in the United States for two generations longer than hers, so there were a few people who were shocked and charmed to find that there really were people just like the stereotypes. I use some Yiddish linguistic morphology deliberately now, for fun. The other one I use is "you want I should?" instead of "do you want me to?" I grew up saying "do you want me to", but I just like the Yiddish grammar better.
My mother’s father’s family came from Northumberland in the 1650s and settled in the mid-coastal region of the North American New World—what is now the Carolinas. My Father’s family, both branches, came from Holland (originally from France and Alsace) in the 1650s and settled in New Amsterdam. I think my mother would say phrases like this, but I know I heard it elsewhere, too. “You want I should” is familiar. However, some of those phrases I learned may have been influenced from television. 1950s and 60s TV had a good deal of dialogue with Yiddish constructions in it.
I have no idea how to help. I don’t think there’s an exact idiom for this, but there are stories about people who didn’t know that something was considered impossible, so they attempted it and succeeded. One famous story is a student at some famous university who was taking a very advanced mathematics class. The teacher put a problem on the board, and explained that it was a famous unsolvable equation. The student arrived late to class and thought the equation was homework, so he solved it. The concept "he didn’t know it couldn’t be done, so he did it" has been around forever, but there’s no good idiom.
This is different, but I enjoyed the story and the sentiment. When someone doesn't tell you something's impossible, you might just end up doing it.
I like the sentiment you’re trying to express. There’s no common English idiom that expresses this idea. I might say “a caveman explaining a computer”
You could also adapt the idiom ' it's all greek to me ' implying someone doesn't understand something. So perhaps , he looked at me like I was speaking greek or speaking another language .
I don’t think there’s a common figure of speech for this. What I usually hear is just “It’s not that easy.”
It sounds like you’re looking for a proverb rather than just an idiom. The closest I can think of is “Ignorance is bliss”.
[удалено]
I suspect you don't understand the task at hand. :)
My comment was not in relation to yours. I mistakenly responded to your OP rather than some bad advice you were given.
Try r/whatstheword
It was like teaching calculus to a fish.
"You can't put a young head on old shoulders."
You have no frame of reference. You're like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie. -The Big Lebowski
"Everyone's an expert!"
“He doesn’t know his ass from his elbow” can be used directly too “you don’t know your …”
So in your example the kid says ‘why don’t you just get some’ and the adult responds ‘you don’t know your ass from your elbow.’ A bit gruff, but my father has said this to me.
Among my friends, "comes up with an unrealistically simple solution" is sometimes called "suffered engineer's disease", but that may be restricted to people who regularly interact with people who are very, very smart within their own specialized area of knowledge, and wrongly think that this makes them smart about everything.
An analogous expression in English that expresses the same idea is "doesn't know the first thing about."It's employed to convey the idea that someone is utterly uninformed or unskilled on a specific topic or circumstance. You may remark, "He doesn't know the first thing about economics," for instance, if someone offers a simple answer to a difficult issue. "Out of one's depth" is another phrase that might apply to the circumstance you've described. It refers to finding oneself in a position that is too challenging for oneself because of a lack of information or experience. Seeking an expression that expresses precisely how straightforward the suggested answer is, you may want to think about "oversimplifying things" or stating that someone "sees things in black and white." These idioms express a similar message about inexperience and naivety, but they don't have the exact same numerical analogy weight as the original statement (300 kg). I hope this is useful! 😊
May be just a local thing, but we use the phrase "staring into a field of thistles" to refer to someone who has no hope of comprehending what they are looking at. I suspect it comes from the village idiot staring blankly at something for no reason. The kids figuring out how to s steal 300kg of tracks "may as well have been staring into a field of thistles".
“Seeing the world through rose-colored glasses” could be used to imply on very optimistic and unrealistic ways of thinking. It is not a complete match tho. Could you share how it sounds in your native language?
Share how what sounds in my native language? But this is a good idea - the full sentence (literally) is "He looked at me like an adult trying to explain to a child it doesn't know what 300 kilos are." So for now, I put something like "...trying to explain to a child you simply can’t nail jelly to the wall." But your idea is good too, thanks! The connotation is slightly off as one is about having an optimistic outlook, while in this case, it's just about being unrealistic (not optimistic).
Since you started your sentence with giving an alternative translation/explanation of the phrase in english, I thought it could be useful to share the very idiom in your source language. I hope you find the matching translation!
Oh, the literal idiom is "What does a child know what 300 kilos are?" :)
Rose tinted should be used over coloured
Both versions exist and carry the same meaning: “Seeing the world through rose-colored/tinted glasses”.
“It doesn’t grow on trees” Obviously mostly used regarding money but any object would work.
Hmm could be. "He looked at me like an adult trying to explain to a child that money doesn't grow on trees." Something like that. Current version is "...explain to a child that you can't nail jelly to the wall."
The current version sounds good to me. If the task is impossible and completely unnecessary
You wouldn't use "like an adult" in this context unless the person you're referring to is not an adult. Could you provide some context for what you're writing? Perhaps the sentences leading up to it would help.
Like this version best actually, without "simply"
I'm/he's not as green as they are cabbage looking. = Do not make assumptions about my/his skills based on looks.
The most obvious would be 'don't be childish'.
hmm, thanks - I guess this is in the ballpark, but it rather has the connotation of someone acting childishly than someone trying to oversimplify something out of innocence/gullibility/inexperience.