Ask Lemmy

FYI this can still happen on liquid propane stoves, so not totally lost to time.

Maybe "Kill two birds with one stone", because who hunts with stones anymore?

"Pulling my leg." Meaning you are making something up/joking at someones expense.

It does not have any real connection to the present. The idiom came about in the mid-19th century. There's two competing theories about how it came about. The prevailing theory is that pick pockets, particularly child pick pockets, would pull on people legs to distract their mark. The darker theory is that it was related to pulling someone's legs when they were hanged in order to finish the ordeal if they didn't die from the initial drop.

In Portuguese the equivalent expression is timeless: "o sujo falando do mal lavado" (the dirty one talking about the badly washed).

went from hell and back, obviously it has a very christiany origin to it as is moving heaven and earth.

I always thought of that idiom as the pot (something generally cast iron and not polished) calling the kettle (something that is polished and therefore reflective) black.

Being that the pot sees itself in the reflection, but calls the kettle that as a derogatory thing, unknowing of it's personal alignment.

(to do something) "on your dime," i.e. at your expense - A reference to public coin operated phones, which for a long time cost 10c/a US "dime" coin per call.

Inflation by the late 70s had made the single dime call a thing of the past, but USD20c was still possible, and inflating phone fees in the 80s required increasing amounts of coinage. Public pay phones were decimated when mobile phones gained popularity and are virtually extinct today in the US.

"on your card" might be a more modern version, but cards are slowly disappearing with NFC phone payments.

whats the point of a modern replacement? idioms connect us across time and when they really have not modern sense (which there is enough understanding of cookware I don't think we hit that with pot and kettle) then it becomes an interesting backstory.

Not quite updating, but in my house we say "like sweeping the yard" to indicate that something is pointless and wasting time.

"Boss has us doing obviously pointless busy work today"

"Yeah, next he'll be having us sweep the yard!"

Or derogatorily:

"I want you to go do that thing."

"Sure, you want me sweep the yard when I'm done?"

"Did you bring the (evening newspaper) with you?" I've used this in different countries, the newspaper referred to is one which historically was sold in the afternoon, not morning. And I ask it of anyone who comes to work late. Now, at least here, all the newspapers come out in the morning, so I just get confused stares.

I assumed the idiom was from a time when all cookware was made of cast iron.

To be honest, I was never prepared to know what "hoisted by one's own pitard" meant, and knowing today, I still have no clue how this was ever relevant to any time period.

A pitard is a timed bomb used to to blow down a door or wall. The idiom is about blowing yourself up mistakenly instead. Were people using these routinely at some point?

I think that many historic trades have been automated to the extent their old terminology is obscure but lives on in idioms.

"To the bitter end" (bitter end meaning the lose end of a rope, from rope-working - not entirely extinct but obscure). Perhaps that one could be "To the edge node"!

"Strike while the iron is hot" (from blacksmithing, again not entirely an extinct craft but largely replaced by automation). Maybe "Cross while the light is green?"

"One bad apple will spoil the whole barrel" desperately needs to be replaced because nobody has experience with storing apples in barrels so when Michael Jackson subverted it they took it unironically and now many people think it means the opposite.

I'm not techy but something about one line of bad code can jank the whole program?

I don't know if its literal origin doesn't make sense to a modern person, but I think that most people still get the literal meaning of "pot calling the kettle black", that that is still understandable, so...

We still use "penny-wise and pound-foolish" in the US. We haven't used the pound since we seceded from the British Empire, and we just ended minting of the penny.

The saying apparently predates the US by about 200 years.