“My first language has a perfect saying for this, but it doesn’t make sense in english :(”
Say it anyway! You don’t owe them perfect clarity. Be profoundly cryptic, speak in riddles, make them ponder what the fuck you meant by that. The anglos, like porridge, must sometimes be stirred, so they don’t burn stuck on the bottom of the pot.
“If I were you, I’d spit on the floor and swim away”
“If my grandmother had two wheels she’d be a bycicle”
“You could scare a popcorn ready
"Uglier than hitting your mom.”
“If you get up from the casket, the funeral ends”
“Jumping over the mental hospital wall with the gates wide open”
“Clapping for a lunatic’s dance”
And if English speakers like it enough (or enough use it) it will be adopted (& probably mangled). Cause the English language is like that.
I’m personally a fan of “a hungry person has bread on their mind” (głodnemu chleb na myśli) and “even Salomon won’t pour from an empty [cup]” (z pustego i Salomon nie naleje)
the first one is most frequently used in case of Freudian Slips, as a joke; the second is used when you’re asked to do something without the necessary equipment
The ones I miss the most when speaking English or German are “It’s enough to paste [person] behind the wallpaper” (je zou [persoon] toch achter het behang plakken" and “I’ll just chase a piglet up a tree for you then” (‘k zal veur ei es e kurreke oewp nen boewm jage zelle).
First one is for when someone has fucked up spectacularly and below any measure of common sense. The second one is when someone is asking for either the impossible, or far more than they’re entitled to ask.
One of my favourite Irish sayings translates to “many a time a man’s mouth broke his nose” for when you just want people to shut the everlasting fuck up and I use it almost daily
My favourite Portuguese saying is ‘maior e vacinado’, means ‘of age and vaccinated’. Essentially if someone is doing something stupid, you say ‘well, they’re old enough to know better/figure it out’
Also like ‘se a minha avó não tivesse morrido, estaria viva’, ‘if my grandmother hadn’t died, she’d be alive’