I was thinking about the phrase ‘The pot calling the kettle black’. It comes from a time where cooking was done over open fires and cookware would become visibly ashy. (Fun fact: It first appears and was perhaps coined by Cervantes in Don Quixote!)
What are some other idioms that have lost their literal connection to time? What would be a good modern replacement?
I think the outdated/obsolete nature of terms in many idioms is what makes them charming.
It also makes it pretty clear you aren’t using them in a literal sense. If your idioms are too new/unfamiliar and your terminology is too modern/relevant then people might just think you’re being literal and not idiomatic.
“Avoiding things like the plague” because people did not actually seem to want to avoid the plague last time around.
“Have your cake and eat it too” doesn’t really make sense. Cake is not rare or expensive enough that simply possessing it feels good. If you have cake, all you want is to eat it.
The italian version, “you want a full barrel and drunk wife” illustrates the same situation much more clearly.
I’m only half joking when I say this could be the modern replacement. I’ve caught both myself and the S.O. using “no take only throw” in conversation, often about unreasonably demanding people.
That’s because it’s backwards. Should be “eat your cake and have it too”
Edit: While that preserves the form and is recognizable as the common saying, it makes the meaning clearer if phrased as “Eat your cake and still have it”.
Also wanting to eat your cake and have it too is supposed to imply you’re like a toddler having a tantrum because you’re just coming to terms with the rules of object permanence: a person playing peekaboo or hide-and-seek can disappear and still come back, but if you eat your cake it will be ALL GONE!!!
Eating a dead horse - not unless you buy the budget beef mince at Tesco
Read like rabbits - rabbits can’t read or even hold books
Nip it in the butt - that’s sexual assault, you’re not allowed to do that any more
Get down off your high horse - you’re not allowed to get animals high either
Kids should be shorn and not herd - goats have hair, not wool, and can’t be shorn. Their natural tendency to herd is a difficult behaviour to break.
Under the weather - unless you’re a pilot you’re going to be under the weather most of the time
A blessing in the skies - unless your bishop is a pilot too, that’s not going to happen.
Fight off more than you can chew - I don’t know where to start with this one,
Boneappletea
You almost got me.
surely there’s a /s or a trollface i’m missing
I’m not pulling your Greg, if that’s what you mean.
I always thought it was “nip it in the bud” where a bud is the early stage of a plants development / before the flower emerges on a flower. So meaning “kill it before it grows larger and that becomes harder”
Has to be trolling because they are all wrong.
Under the weather is right.
And get off your high horse is right too. So the whole thing was a weird comment, leaving the readers uncertain if OP was trolling or just…yeah mostly trolling.
Oh, man, when it comes to nautical idioms, I could go on all day. There are so many, and they’ve lost their literal connections so thoroughly, you probably don’t even think of some of them as idioms. A few that occur to me immediately:
- taken aback (wind on the wrong side of the sails)
- give a wide berth (extra space for a vessel to maneuver)
- leeway (unwanted downwind slippage of the vessel when in motion)
- above board (on deck, the board being the section of the hull running fore and aft just above the water line)
- onboard (to load onto the deck of the ship)
- go by the board (to fall off of the ship into the water, passing the board on the way)
- hand over fist (two-handed motion to pull in sails, ropes, etc. as quickly as possible)
- high and dry (above the tide line)
- loose cannon (a gun insufficiently secured would cause havoc on a warship when fired, or as the ship rolled in waves)
Honestly, I’m not sure that I want modern equivalents, since many are so rich in imagery.
Don’t forget “I like the cut of your jib”
Three sheets to the wind!
It’s a shame most people think that’s about sails being up, but sheets are the ropes that control the sails, if they are to the wind you’re not going to make any way
“Burning the midnight oil”
Your using your battery without a wall charger, huh?
Good one! I would offer ‘Draining the house battery’ as a replacement but it doesn’t really have a ring to. Maybe ‘You’ve been living in low blue light mode’. No that’s even worse! somebody help me here 😅.
using solar at night
“yer using solar at night, ain’t ya boi”
that’s more of a ‘you’re a dumbass’ than a ‘you’re a hard worker’ tho, innit?
Ignite the midnight petroleum.
All the horse ones because we don’t use horses anymore. There a ton of them.
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Who tf gets a gift horse?
Saddle up. Who tf has a saddle?
Hold your horses. Who tf has horses to hold?
Get off your high horse. Who tf has a high horse?
Beat a dead horse. WTF.
To update replace all with car.
Dont look under the hood of a gift car.
Buckle up.
Hold your engine.
Get out of your limousine.
Turn the key on a drowned engine.
You could still use Hold your horses because the car has horse power. Pressing the brake pedal literally holds your horses.
But that in itself is an outdated idiom. A car has engine power.
I don’t think it’s the char/open fire but rather that both pot a d kettle would be made of the same black cast iron
in our holiday house we still cook on an iron stove. we also installed a small gas burner, because that stove is the heating system for all the 3 small rooms. it gets really hot - so usually you don’t want to use it during summer.
but the original pans are out of copper. they have a complex shape so, if you remove the cooking top, you can hang them directly into the fire. cast iron surely was and still is a thing. but i will always choose copper over cast iron for something i want hot quickly. i would bet that most kettles where made out of something thin and conductive, so your water is hot quicker.
all our copper is black from the sud.
I love head over heels as, in love.
It’s vice versa that makes actual sense, but that was considered too obviously risqué in the age the phrase was coined.
“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.
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?”
Raking the forest
In my home country they say “Cheap as Onions” (eq in English : Cheap as Dirt)
Looking at the prices on Onions nowadays …
In Italy, when something is expensive, we say that it’s salted. Because salt was expensive. Hasn’t been for a while but the word is still there!
“Worth ones salt” is older and sort of Italian (Roman)
Same in Germany
A stitch in time saves nine.
This refers to a time when clothes were hard to come by and often homemade. If they tore, a small tear could be fixed with one stitch of needle and thread, but if let go too long, it would take many more stitches to repair a bigger rip.
Change your oil (or tires) in time, or change your car.
Dollars to donuts originated in an age when a dollar could buy a considerable quantity of donuts. Inflation has since reduced the literal interpretation of the expression to nearly even odds.
Doughnuts are also zeros
In 2026 it’s literally Donuts To Dollars.
Time is a flat, fried, circle drenched in chocolate frosting and filled with cream!
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?
I think I remember seeing a PETA post years ago that suggested “feed two birds with one scone”
