Hello everyone! I hope you all are doing great, enjoying the cooling down and colors change all around you. I miss fall a lot, you start appreciating seasons when you are deprived of them. My friends and acquaintances say that they envy me that I have summer all year round, but I do miss fall. The yellow leaves, fogs, cold rains when you can sit in a cafe, sip something warm and watch people rush by. At the same time, fall is the season of results that can look like a basket of apples from your garden or something more abstract. In Ukraine, we say that even a sparrow is rich in fall. There is a whole bunch of other proverbs about fall and most of them are result-oriented. For example, count chickens in fall, quite good advice for those who jump into conclusions right away or want quick results. I like proverbs and sayings a lot since they help to express complicated ideas in an eloquent and concise way. That's why I decided to dedicate one more text to As we say in Ukraine.
Today I will describe to you TOP-5 of my favourite sayings. Unfortunately, I can't use them in English because they will sound weird in translation, but I will translate them for you and the concepts that stand behind them.
So #5 is a pig-related one: A granny had no worries and so she bought a piglet. If you never lived on a farm you need to know that to have a couple of chickens and a pig is a very time-consuming thing. You need to feed them on a regular basis, you need to make sure that the chicken coup and the barn are relatively clean and if you live in a four-season area you need to make sure that they are warm in winter. My grandpa very often lives on his chickens' schedule )) So this saying is really true!
#4 Send a fool to pray to god, he will break open his forehead. Persistence is a great thing and can bring really great results, however, there are people that can turn pretty much anything into a catastrophe. I bet you have observed in your life stupid people striving to get something with a ridiculous degree of persistence. I have to admit that sometimes I even envy them because they have this endless amount of energy and blind faith that whatever they do will make them happy or change their life. When you are smart and persistent it's still a different story. The grain of doubt sits tightly in your mind and maybe because of it, you don't go for certain things in your life. This saying is pretty popular with older people in Ukraine when they try to characterise the younger generation.
#3 has an equivalent in English but it sounds very logical while its Ukrainian counterpart underlines all absurdity of the situation. So the Ukrainian version of the saying is "An elder tree in the garden and an uncle in Kyiv". Makes no sense, right? So you would use this saying in Ukrainian if the person you are talking to tells you something that makes no sense. "That is something utterly irrelevant" that's how you would say it in English. It's funny that sometimes you don't need to say the whole phrase to the person, you just say "An elder tree in the garden" and they understand that they are talking nonsense.
#2 This one is incredibly philosophical. Sometimes I even take it as a compliment though it isn't considered to be a saying with positive meaning, especially if an older person characterises you like that: You can talk to the mountain but the mountain will remain to be a mountain. S-T-U-B-B-O-R-N-N-E-S-S!!! This saying describes stubborn people and I take it as a compliment because this feature of mine has helped me move ahead in my life even when others doubted my choices. That's why sometimes I can be a mountain ))) For some reason this saying associates in my head with Japanese mountain Fuji. It's always there, just like any big idea that sits in my head.
My number 1 is a very interesting saying for a couple of reasons. Most of all I like that historic aspect of it. But firstly, I will tell you how it would sound in English and then explain how it appeared. So, To jump out like a Pylyp (Philip) from hemp bushes. This saying will be used in a variety of cases. For instance, you would use it when somebody does something unexpected or even literally jumps out at you. At the same time, you can use it when somebody says something unexpected, something that hardly fits the situation. So the historical aspect of this saying has two constituents: the first one is the name "Philip" used in the saying. I will open you a secret, name Pylyp (Philip) was used in old times to call hares, it was a kind of nickname for them. Along with that, this saying describes a very important fact about my country. The hare in the proverb jumps out from the field of hemp. HEMP! Not rye, wheat, barley or any other kind of field. I'm not hinting on my ancestors to smoke weed or getting high every single day. Of course, they did it, because tobacco was brought to Ukraine at the beginning of the 17th century and I do know for sure that my ancestors were smoking pipes a long time before it. And whatever they were putting in those pipes did have some effect similar to trance since some of the herbal mixes were smoked strictly before important battles by well-known Ukrainian Cossacks. Hemp was one of the components and t people also knew about the anaesthetic effect of hemp seeds and they would make a different kind of teas for people that were in a lot of pain. Moreover, hemp was not a plant that you would have to go and look for somewhere, we grew hemp just like any other cropper because its stems were used to make cloth. The cloth was used to make clothing and other textile goods one needed at home. The great thing about hemp cloth is that it's hyper allergic and very durable. Nowadays, there is a bunch of small productions in Ukraine that manufacture clothing and shoes out of hemp. Now you can see why I like this saying so much. It literally uncovers a huge layer of Ukrainian history and a simple hare that jumps out of the bushes of hemp can tell you the whole story.
I hope I didn't bore you with this long historical explanation but I find it cool when things like this can take you centuries back and tell you something more than just an outer shell.
With everything said and done I wish you a wonderful time of the day and BEHAVE!
P.S. Just a couple of photos of clothing and shoes made out of hemp. All photos were taken from the Internet.
Today I will describe to you TOP-5 of my favourite sayings. Unfortunately, I can't use them in English because they will sound weird in translation, but I will translate them for you and the concepts that stand behind them.
So #5 is a pig-related one: A granny had no worries and so she bought a piglet. If you never lived on a farm you need to know that to have a couple of chickens and a pig is a very time-consuming thing. You need to feed them on a regular basis, you need to make sure that the chicken coup and the barn are relatively clean and if you live in a four-season area you need to make sure that they are warm in winter. My grandpa very often lives on his chickens' schedule )) So this saying is really true!
#4 Send a fool to pray to god, he will break open his forehead. Persistence is a great thing and can bring really great results, however, there are people that can turn pretty much anything into a catastrophe. I bet you have observed in your life stupid people striving to get something with a ridiculous degree of persistence. I have to admit that sometimes I even envy them because they have this endless amount of energy and blind faith that whatever they do will make them happy or change their life. When you are smart and persistent it's still a different story. The grain of doubt sits tightly in your mind and maybe because of it, you don't go for certain things in your life. This saying is pretty popular with older people in Ukraine when they try to characterise the younger generation.
#3 has an equivalent in English but it sounds very logical while its Ukrainian counterpart underlines all absurdity of the situation. So the Ukrainian version of the saying is "An elder tree in the garden and an uncle in Kyiv". Makes no sense, right? So you would use this saying in Ukrainian if the person you are talking to tells you something that makes no sense. "That is something utterly irrelevant" that's how you would say it in English. It's funny that sometimes you don't need to say the whole phrase to the person, you just say "An elder tree in the garden" and they understand that they are talking nonsense.
#2 This one is incredibly philosophical. Sometimes I even take it as a compliment though it isn't considered to be a saying with positive meaning, especially if an older person characterises you like that: You can talk to the mountain but the mountain will remain to be a mountain. S-T-U-B-B-O-R-N-N-E-S-S!!! This saying describes stubborn people and I take it as a compliment because this feature of mine has helped me move ahead in my life even when others doubted my choices. That's why sometimes I can be a mountain ))) For some reason this saying associates in my head with Japanese mountain Fuji. It's always there, just like any big idea that sits in my head.
My number 1 is a very interesting saying for a couple of reasons. Most of all I like that historic aspect of it. But firstly, I will tell you how it would sound in English and then explain how it appeared. So, To jump out like a Pylyp (Philip) from hemp bushes. This saying will be used in a variety of cases. For instance, you would use it when somebody does something unexpected or even literally jumps out at you. At the same time, you can use it when somebody says something unexpected, something that hardly fits the situation. So the historical aspect of this saying has two constituents: the first one is the name "Philip" used in the saying. I will open you a secret, name Pylyp (Philip) was used in old times to call hares, it was a kind of nickname for them. Along with that, this saying describes a very important fact about my country. The hare in the proverb jumps out from the field of hemp. HEMP! Not rye, wheat, barley or any other kind of field. I'm not hinting on my ancestors to smoke weed or getting high every single day. Of course, they did it, because tobacco was brought to Ukraine at the beginning of the 17th century and I do know for sure that my ancestors were smoking pipes a long time before it. And whatever they were putting in those pipes did have some effect similar to trance since some of the herbal mixes were smoked strictly before important battles by well-known Ukrainian Cossacks. Hemp was one of the components and t people also knew about the anaesthetic effect of hemp seeds and they would make a different kind of teas for people that were in a lot of pain. Moreover, hemp was not a plant that you would have to go and look for somewhere, we grew hemp just like any other cropper because its stems were used to make cloth. The cloth was used to make clothing and other textile goods one needed at home. The great thing about hemp cloth is that it's hyper allergic and very durable. Nowadays, there is a bunch of small productions in Ukraine that manufacture clothing and shoes out of hemp. Now you can see why I like this saying so much. It literally uncovers a huge layer of Ukrainian history and a simple hare that jumps out of the bushes of hemp can tell you the whole story.
I hope I didn't bore you with this long historical explanation but I find it cool when things like this can take you centuries back and tell you something more than just an outer shell.
With everything said and done I wish you a wonderful time of the day and BEHAVE!
P.S. Just a couple of photos of clothing and shoes made out of hemp. All photos were taken from the Internet.
