{"id":8163,"date":"2013-01-25T16:42:12","date_gmt":"2013-01-25T16:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=8163"},"modified":"2013-01-25T16:42:12","modified_gmt":"2013-01-25T16:42:12","slug":"the-combed-giraffe-sings-like-a-saucepan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=8163","title":{"rendered":"The combed giraffe sings like a saucepan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I came across a number of interesting French idioms today in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/media\/mind-your-language\/2013\/jan\/04\/mind-your-language-idioms\">this article<\/a> in The Guardian, including <em>peigner la giraffe<\/em> (combing the giraffe), which means to waste time on a pointless task, and <em>chanter comme une casserole<\/em> (to sing like a saucepan) or to sing terribly. It also mentions a Dutch idiom, <em>broodje aap verhaal<\/em> (monkey sandwich story), which refers to persistent rumours or urban legends.<\/p>\n<p>English equivalents of <em>peigner la giraffe include idling, dossing (about), doing nothing (much), killing time, and so on. Do you have any others?<\/p>\n<p>How about English or other language equivalents of <\/em><em>chanter comme une casserole<\/em> or <em>broodje aap verhaal<\/em>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I came across a number of interesting French idioms today in this article in The Guardian, including peigner la giraffe (combing the giraffe), which means to waste time on a pointless task, and chanter comme une casserole (to sing like a saucepan) or to sing terribly. It also mentions a Dutch idiom, broodje aap verhaal [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102,104,111,125,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dutch","category-english","category-french","category-idioms","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8163","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=8163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}