Polish - „you can’t make a whip out of shit” „z gówna bicza nie ukręcisz”
I can sure as hell try
I think this takes home the prize for weirdest.
I like this one
I imagine it wouldn’t hurt as much as a whip, but probably equally intimidating.
You can’t polish a turd.
I dunno, man… Look up coprolite. You can absolutely polish them.
Having looked at some of the reports I have to clean up, I can tell you that yes, in fact, you CAN polish a turd
“You can’t get blood from a stone” is classic in the US. “No more juice from the squeeze” is another variant.
How is that even similar?
How is it not? The euphemisms all mean you “cant get X from Y.”
Both of my examples mean exactly that.
“You can’t make a silk purse from sows ear” means you can’t make something nice from rubbish. “You can’t get blood from a stone” means attempting something difficult, if not impossible and futile”. E.g. “trying to get my kids to tell me about their school day is like trying to get blood from a stone.” It doesn’t matter how hard I try I get nothing.
A sow is a female pig, which doesnt produce silk at all. Attempting to get silk from it would be difficult, if not impossible and futile. It wouldn’t matter how hard you try, you would get nothing.
You can get as much silk from a sows ear as you can get blood from a stone. I dont see much differnce, but i guess the sows ear phrase requires more culture context if it means “you can’t get something nice from rubbish.”
One of the versions I have heard about this analogy comes from corn silk. The corn fed to pigs is usually of the lowest quality, and if you use the silk from cheap ears of corn, you won’t be able to make a useful purse out of it
You can’t pick a naked man’s pocket.
Challenge accepted.
巧妇难为无米之炊 – “even the cleverest house wife cannot cook without rice”.
The proverb you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear means you can’t create a fine product from inferior materials.
I’d argue it’s closer to 朽木不可雕^. 巧婦難為無米之炊 (巧妇难为无米之炊) is more like you can’t make stuff without the necessary requirements.
^朽木不可雕: Lit. Rotten wood can’t be carved, metaphorically You can’t teach a student that is too dumb.
… Well actually no. Upon looking into these 3 idioms further while composing this comment, I leaned more and more towards that 巧婦難為無米之炊 is actually closer. Why? Because 朽木不可雕 applies only to humans and it puts more of a focus on the rotten wood (aka the dumb student).
I guess this comment was kind of useless lol but I decided to post it anyway because I put in way too much effort
I guess we use “Making gold from straw” (German).
Isn’t there literally a German fairy tale about someone able to make straw into gold?
Rumpelstiltskin.
Naomi Novik wrote a lovely book inspired by it called “Spinning Silver.”
Yes, that’s where it’s from.
Probably the closest in Irish is “is deacair olann a bhaint de ghabhar” (it’s hard to get wool from a goat)
You can put your boots in the oven, but that don’t make 'em biscuits
“You can’t expect pears out of an elm tree” or “No le pidas peras al olmo”
German for “like father, like son” is “the apple doesn’t fall far off the tree trunk”. But many people nowadays use “the apple doesn’t fall far off the pear tree”, which is a variant that I think originally was supposed to suggest illegitimate fatherhood.
Isn’t that more like “you can’t ask an elm tree for pears?”
And even more literally “don’t ask for pears to the elm?”
Lipstick on a pig along with others already mentioned.
cuir síoda ar ghabhar; is gabhar fós é
In Australia there’s “you can’t polish a turd”
We use this one also
But you can roll it in glitter
“You can’t put lipstick on a pig” was popular for about a year in the US, circa 2007
In Danish we have “you can’t cut the hair off a bald guy”
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“Even if you give an ape a ring, it’ll remain an ugly thing.” -Netherlands.
A golden ring specifically
If I understand the original idiom, the nearest French expression would be “you can’t make a race horse from a donkey” (“tu ne peux pas faire un cheval de course d’un âne”).
