You can’t paint the Mona Lisa with crayons.
Kind of related to yours, “You’re putting lipstick on a pig”
Probably the closest in Irish is “is deacair olann a bhaint de ghabhar” (it’s hard to get wool from a goat)
Depends where you live I guess. Mohair and cashmere come from goats.
“You can’t get blood from a stone” is classic in the US. “No more juice from a 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.”
In the US there’s the saying “you can’t squeeze water from a stone”
I always heard it as blood from a stone, but yeah.
Polish - „you can’t make a whip out of shit” „z gówna bicza nie ukręcisz”
I like this one
I think this takes home the prize for weirdest.
I imagine it wouldn’t hurt as much as a whip, but probably equally intimidating.
I can sure as hell try
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 polish a turd but it’s still shit
You can’t polish a turd; you can roll it in glitter.
You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit
You can make cattle feed out of it though.
You can’t pick a naked man’s pocket.
That’s nature’s pocket.
The prison wallet
“Make sure he doesn’t pick your pocket!”
Challenge accepted.
Lipstick on a pig along with others already mentioned.
cuir síoda ar ghabhar; is gabhar fós é
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.
it should just be deleted
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”).
“You can’t put lipstick on a pig” was popular for about a year in the US, circa 2007
“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.
That’s interesting, because “the apple doesn’t/didn’t fall far from the tree” is a known Anglophonic saying that basically means that a child turned out a lot like a parent (gender not necessarily specified). I wonder if one is a calque of the other.
The above poster isnt really correct. We have an actual saying that is the literal translation: "Der Apfel fällt nicht weit vom Stamm ". And it means exactly what you suggest, a child being very much like one of their parents in one way or another.
Like father, like son exists as well, “Wie der Vater so der Sohn”.
Lmao your username 😭
You’re right, I forgot about the fact that there’s a literal translation. But besides being gender-neutral, both sayings mean the same, no?
My main point was that many Germans now regularly use the pear-tree malapropism, however.
You can put your boots in the oven, but that don’t make 'em biscuits
