Surface works
It’s one of my least favourite sayings, ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions’. I think it means that intending to do good, but failing to follow it through is a bad thing… but surely that can’t be worse that intending to do something bad and actually doing it?
Maybe the phrase could be altered… ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions but the train is pure malice’.
Idioms – phrases with the sole purpose of making non-natives look confused.
And even if you know what those words mean, I’m sure the average person would have a hard time telling you why they mean that.
I assume, this being written in English (or close enough) you understand such classics as ‘letting the cat out of the bag’ and ‘in a pinch’, but how are you with some more obscure ones such as ‘brass monkeys’?
It’s a two way street – every language has its intentionally confusing idioms – Take the Latvian that translates as ‘up a stove pipe’… you could make a reasonable guess what that means, and you would likely be right… right but still unsure.
And it is this global uncertainty that lets you get away with a great pass-time – inserting nonsensical idioms into conversations. Try it, the more outrageous the more points, providing you don’t get pulled up on it.
… I phoned Mike in IT, he said the motherboard had bitten the kitten and that we might as well put the slipper on it for now…
justine on 
I had the joy of explaing British idioms to a German student last year. It made me realise how little sense they really make.
Btw, my copy of the book arrived last week, and if anyone hasn’t ordered it yet…what are you THINKING?! Buy it, it’s excellent! Even my mum enjoyed it
Thanks Maddie, that’s the sort of PR I need… and I’m really glad you like it… and especially glad your mum likes it too.
I’m always interested to find out what people, especially those that are unlikely to encounter my comic normally, think about The Flowfield Unity.
Conversely, German idiom’s are similar to British ones, however they mean different things. Take the phrase ‘feeling blue’. In English this tends to mean depression, whilst in German it means to be drunk.
Really? Drunk? Those wacky Germans!
I got my book yesterday, too! I’m with Maddie, it’s wonderful.
I avoid the whole “road to Hell” pitfall by only doing good things unintentionally. Technically I don’t believe in universal concepts of good and evil so my intentions are inherently neutral.
The road to limbo is paved with neutral intentions…
Makes you wonder though, just who is contracted to do all of this paving? Assuming that Hell is a fair distance away, how much paving would that take?
I don’t think “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” is about not following things through. I always interpreted it to mean that good intentions are not a sufficient condition for a particular action to be worth taking. Whether or not they are a necessary condition is up to the individual, but that would be an entirely different discussion.
I think the “Road to hell” saying is about means not justifying the ends.
Anyway, I doubt the rest of the world can compete with Australia or certain parts of England for use of idioms, rhyming slang and other colloquial nasties.
That’s what I’ve always thought it meant - you start out with good intentions, but the measures you have to take end up being more evil than the thing you were trying to stop.
Like the good intention “let’s reduce crime” potentially leading to a “hell” of surveillance and security.
I think we’re all just running around trying to do what we think is right, to be honest.
Mostly it’s in circles.
Brass Monkeys. I think they were in 2nd edition D&D but removed from 3rd edition… I suspect they had a THAC0 of 3.
ha, that’s true.
I wonder if their name is derived from the idiom…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7457287.stm
Fitting, as we’ve just had a meeting with marketing at work…
/b
Ah, there’s a good one in Latin that translates roughly to “he took his foot,” to mean “he left.” Our Latin teacher in high school, however, had the silly motto that “idioms are for idiots,” and forced us to translate all the silly idioms quite literally, which lead to some funny translations, particular of Julius Caesar, who was fond of outrageous highbrow idiomatic phrases.
I like the idea of ‘taking your foot’ works brilliantly
I think it might be another Latvian one, but there is also a phrase that translates as ‘being kicked upstairs’ to mean falling over something.
So, you had latin lessons too? I can only remember the lating contained within the story of the textbook we used.
It was called Ecce Romani:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Romani
I had a bit of a thing for Cornelia.
I’m glad you brought this up, because I’ve just been wondering something else idiomatic: cats, and their having of nine lives.
Some people believe in the superstition that cats have nine lives, because cats can survive falls from high places with few, if any injuries.
Which is all well and good, but my question is … why nine? Why not ten, or eight? Who counted?
I’d also like to know how anyone can prove that no two snowflakes are alike. Maybe one fell in the U.K. in 1974, and melted immediately, but before it did, it was exactly identical to one that fell in New York City in 1991, that got buried in a snowdrift when the roads were plowed.
We did an experiment, and by ‘we’ I mean scientists. We ended up with a lot of dead cats, but at least we had an accurate answer… 9.
It is just a mean average though, some cats have less, others have more. That’s why they treat each life like it’s the last, they have no way of telling.
We do though. It turns out that the number of lives a cat has left is proportional to the amount of time it takes to bite you when you grab its tail by the tip.
As for the snowflakes, i’m all out of smart-ass ideas for that I’m afraid… actually it may be one of those language puzzle games. It is true that no TWO snowflakes are alike, this is because they are all triplets.
Also, someone actually did perform an experiment to test whether cats always land on their feet.
Dropping cats out of windows from sequential floors, scientists determined that cats will land on their feet, mostly unharmed up to the 11th floor. On the 11th and 12th floors the cats would not land so well, few survived. From the 13th onward however, the cats chance of survival increased once again.
Apparently it has something to do with terminal velocity and the amount of time it takes for a cat to spin.
Science, destroying things since 200BC
I’ve heard that cats have a non-lethal terminal velocity, so they physically can’t fall fast enough to kill themselves, unless they land awkwardly and break their back.
So dropping from really high up gives them the time to get oriented, dropping from lower down they aren’t going fast enough to do much damage even if they land not-so-well, and somewhere around 10 stories (I heard 9, you said 11 or 12, I shot in the middle) is the turning point between the 2 where you get the worst of both worlds.
Correct, that.
‘I heard 9, you said 11 or 12, I shot in the middle’ – spoken like a true scientist.
Well if I was really being science-y about it I’d have to go do my own experimentation then quote the results… anyone know where I can find a cat and a 10 story building?
Does it have to be a live cat?
I have a cat thats 5/9 alive. Sure it wasted four of them in the cleaner cabinet in my laundry room, but it’s still good for five tosses out a window.
“Still good for N tosses” I’ll have to make that one part of my repertoire.
The idiom about good intentions, I think, just means that people who mean well can still cause huge problems. And in fact, the worst problems in the world are usually caused by people who thought they were doing the right thing. Hitler sincerely believed the world would be better off living by his rules. The colonists of the Americas truly thought they deserved the land more than the natives did. George W. Bush is honestly convinced it was a good idea to invade Iraq.
The real question is– can someone go to heaven on a road paved with bad intentions? I think the character Vendetta at http://www.makingfiends.com/ has managed it. Poor thing, she tries *so* hard to make Charlotte suffer, but her efforts always somehow get turned around to make Charlotte happy…
Also, there’s an interesting article about snowflake alikeness:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/alike/alike.htm
So, unlikely… improbably so, but possible… thought the chances of finding them are ’staggeringly’ small.
Better put project 24 on hold then.
I found this link on b3ta today, it’s probably going to be of great interest to most of the commenters to this episode…
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/index.html
You can also look at Michael Quinon’s World Wide Words:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/index.htm
He’s one of the editors of the OED, and does articles… very nice site.
Beemoh, Davey, thanks… both those links are great. I really enjoy that sort of thing (and use it to bore the hell out of people).
I go to that site alot… Don’t remember how I found it but I guess his credentials are pretty good. : )
It’s not exactly intellectual, but some of these are very interesting, especially when taken literally.
http://www.cracked.com/article_16275_9-most-devastating-insults-from-around-world.html
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