Sunday, January 05, 2003

fun with dictionaries

from apples to eyeballs to swinging cats
(or, the wonderful world of idiom

a few years ago I received as a gift my first Russian-English dictionary, and one of the first words to catch my eye was yabloko, a lovely word that rolls off the tongue nicely.
the entry for it was this:
yabloko: apple
glaznoe yabloko: eyeball
v yablokakh: dappled (horse color)
yabloko oo negde upast: there's not enough room to swing a cat
(which really translates to "not enough room for an apple to fall")