{"id":12138,"date":"2016-03-08T13:32:21","date_gmt":"2016-03-08T13:32:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=12138"},"modified":"2016-03-08T13:32:21","modified_gmt":"2016-03-08T13:32:21","slug":"elephant-flies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=12138","title":{"rendered":"Elephant flies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An interesting Dutch idiom I came across today is <strong>van een vlieg een olifant maken<\/strong> or &#8220;to make an elephant out of a fly&#8221;, which is the Dutch equivalent of the English idiom <em>to make a mountain out of a molehill<\/em>. <\/p>\n<p>This comes from a post on the blog <a href=\"http:\/\/stuffdutchpeoplelike.com\/2016\/03\/08\/funny-dutch-expressions\/\">Stuff Dutch People Like<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Other idioms from this post include:<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; <strong>Nu komt de aap uit de mouw<\/strong> (Now the monkey comes out of the sleeve) = To let the cat out of the bag, i.e. to reveal the hidden motive or the truth behind something.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; <strong>Ben je van de trap gevallen?<\/strong> (Did you fall down the stairs?) = Did you have a fight with a lawn mower? &#8211; said to people who&#8217;ve had a rather drastic haircut.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; <strong>Wie boter op zijn hoofd heeft, moet uit de zon blijven<\/strong> (Those with butter on their heads should stay out of the sun) = People in glass houses shouldn\u2019t throw stones, i.e. do not criticize others unless you are without fault.<\/p>\n<p>Are there equivalents of these idioms in other languages?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An interesting Dutch idiom I came across today is van een vlieg een olifant maken or &#8220;to make an elephant out of a fly&#8221;, which is the Dutch equivalent of the English idiom to make a mountain out of a molehill. This comes from a post on the blog Stuff Dutch People Like. Other idioms [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102,104,125,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dutch","category-english","category-idioms","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}