mccReading via mastodon translate a thread by a French poster about recent actions by Macron and partway through got slapped in the face with the discovery that "I'll eat my hat" is an idiom in France as well as America ("Bon, je mange mon chapeau, et c'est pas très bon.")
Is this… how universal is this? Do they eat hats in Germany? Russia? What percentage of earth has a local-language idiom for eating hats?
Census from responses:
Eat hats: English, French, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish*, Icelandic, Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian*, Hebrew
Do not eat hats: German, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Yiddish, Mandarin Chinese
Contradictory data re: hat-eating: Dutch
* Hat may optionally be "old"
Provisional unified theory of hat-eating (highlighted countries eat hats to express an unlikely event has occured)
The major outstanding question here is whether they eat hats in Estonia*. Is this a universal feature of Uralic languages
* Update: YES
Jeff Robot 🤖@mcc — Estonians do eat hats, but on a different occasion. Specifically when they believe that something’s impossible e.g., “I’ll eat my [old] hat if Estonians land on the dark side of the moon.” We’re one confident nation 😅
https://sõnaveeb.ee/search/unif/dlall/dsall/oma%20mütsi%20ära%20sööma/1
@boxyrobot ah, that's the same as the English expression— my "shame and anguish" comment was just me being cutesy.
The "old" is a bit of a surprise, not sure I've seen that in other variants of the espression
Jeremy Bornstein@mcc
i wonder if they eat the old hat because they still need the new hat, dammit.
i wonder if they eat the old hat because they still need the new hat, dammit.