I love everything in regards to other languages and cultures; how they sound, how they look, and how somehow–someway–they interconnect with each other in a beautiful way. But as you are learning a new language—for whatever reason!—you eventually bump into some of that language’s insults. Some of them make sense, and you can easily find some equivalence in your language, but others…imagine that you annoyed someone in Serbia in such a way that they wish that “your wife gives birth to a centipede, so you have to work for shoes the rest of your life.” Well, that’s quite odd and specific.
This infographic offers 20 of these untranslatable foreign phrases, which range from other weirdly specific examples such as somebody claiming that “you can sharpen an ax on the top of someone’s head” in Russia (because he or she has a thick and stubborn head, get it?), or hearing that someone is “as thick as manure, but half as useful” in Ireland.
On the other hand, there are the phrases where you just don’t know what to think of them unless someone explains them to you, let’s say that you hear someone being called “dog baby” in Korean, or “250”—yes, just the number 250!—in China, just to realize that these are actually insults!