Simon Ager’s site Omniglot.com is stacked with full-deckisms from around the world. In English-speaking countries, someone who’s not quite with it is said to be “two sandwiches short of a picnic.” In Germany, however, this is described with the question “Are you still ticking on time?” An earlier episode of “A Way with Words” addressed full-deckisms, those clever phrases describing someone who falls short in some way. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “International Full-Deckisms”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Grant, I’ve been having a blast lately on the website called Omniglot.com.
You’re familiar with this.
This is run by Simon Ager.
He’s from the UK. He lives in Wales.
And like so many of us in the language trade, he is an autodidact.
He’s taught himself many, many, many, many languages,
Hence the name Omniglot, which of course means all tongues.
And the site is a lot of fun.
It’s kind of limited, but it’s limited to some interesting things.
If you ever want to know how to say, my hovercraft is full of eels in a whole lot of languages, it has that.
That’s from the old Monty Python skit.
But one of my favorite pages on this site that I’ve been playing with lately has to do with those expressions like two sandwiches short of a picnic.
Oh, full deckism.
Oh, yeah, right, right.
Okay, that’s the word.
We talked about it on the show before.
And there are some great ones from all around the world that people have shared with him.
And you can go there and share your own if you know some.
How about these?
This one from Portuguese.
He has monkeys in the attic.
Same thing for a full deckism.
Or he’s a rotten garlic head.
That’s new.
I love that.
Also Portuguese.
Yes.
Yes.
In Serbian, you’re crazy as electricity.
Isn’t that a great image?
Oh, yeah.
That’s great.
I like that a lot.
In Czech, it’s splashing on his lighthouse.
Now, what in the world is that?
It’s splashing on his light hips.
And that means crazy or just a little off balance?
Yeah, a little bit off, a little bit off.
I see.
And in German, you ask someone, are you still ticking on time?
Oh, yeah, I bet it sounds better in the original German.
Yeah, probably, probably.
Another one that I really like is from Cantonese.
Something is unclear as a leather lantern.
That’s great, because you can’t see through a leather lantern.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that.
And finally, there’s a long expression from French that translates as,
He understands quickly, but you have to spend a long time explaining things to him.
Nice.
So there are all kinds of great things on that website.
So that’s Omniglot.com by Simon Egger.
Check it out.
We take your questions about words and language, any aspect of it,
Grammar, punctuation, slang, books, literature, poetry, rhymes, puns, you name it.
877-929-9673, or send it all in email to words@waywordradio.org.
