GLOSSARY ENTRY (DERIVED FROM QUESTION BELOW) | ||||||
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14:53 May 15, 2007 |
Hungarian to English translations [PRO] Idioms / Maxims / Sayings | |||||||
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| Selected response from: Katalin Horváth McClure United States Local time: 01:42 | ||||||
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Summary of answers provided | ||||
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3 +1 | putty club |
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4 | bootless (club, company) |
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3 | all talk, no action group |
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putty club Explanation: Ez szó szerinti fordítás, magyarázat nélkül szerintem nem használható önmagában. Csak azért teszem ezt ide, mert érdekesnek találtam, hogy egy templomi prédikációban említik a Pél utcai fiúkat és a gittegyletet. "Permit me a slight digression on the topic of chewing gum. There is in Hungarian literature a children’s book titled A Pál Utcai Fiúk—The Paul Street Boys—by Ferenc Molnar that every schoolchild reads and knows, almost by heart. The Paul Street Boys are a gang—they are a club of boys and their chief activity is chipping the putty out of window frames. Yes, I know this sounds bizarre and it is—but ask any Hungarian and they will know it. The boys then chew the window putty to soften it up and the entire purpose of their gang is to accumulate more and more window putty which they roll into a large ball that is placed before them at club meetings. This boy’s club is called, in Hungarian, a gittegylet—a putty club—and the standard euphemism for any organization that has odd but ultimately pointless rituals and no discernible purpose is that it is a gittegylet. Many human activities and possibly churches especially, are forever in danger of becoming putty clubs. This may even be happening now to St. Peter’s basilica—and if it can happen to St. Peter’s it could happen here and I challenge us to never allow Unitarian Universalism to become such a hollow thing as a putty club. " -------------------------------------------------- Note added at 17 perc (2007-05-15 15:11:25 GMT) -------------------------------------------------- Még egy érdekesség, az 1977-es Boy's Club c. film magyar címe Gittegylet lett : http://www.odeon.hu/kat.phtml?id=1609 Reference: http://www.ascboston.org/worship/text/060430-ord.html |
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all talk, no action group Explanation: sajnos nem olyan tömör, mint kellene, de egyszerűbb, mint elmagyarázni a gittet tolmácsolás közben :) |
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bootless (club, company) Explanation: A "bootless" - annak, aki ismeri a szó igazi értelmét, lényegében a gittegylet hatását idézi fel. A "club/company" (mint egylet) itt persze hozzá tartozik. "Ineffectual, useless".... mondja az alábbi idézet, de hozzá lehet tenni a következő szinonímákat is: futile, barren, fruitless, ineffective, pointless, profitless, sterile, unavailing, unproductive, unsuccessful, vain, worthless. "Around the time of the Norman Conquest a boot, also often spelt bote, was something advantageous, profitable or good (through the ancient Germanic languages, it’s closely linked with better and best as the comparative and superlative of good). We still have it in the fixed phrase to boot, meaning something extra or additional; back around the year 1000 the phrase meant “to the good; to one’s advantage”. There were lots of meanings associated with boot: it might mean a levy taken to repair a road or bridge; in the feudal system it referred to the right of a tenant to take timber from his lord’s estate for fuel or repairs (a set of words existed for various kinds, such as firebote, housebote, and hedgebote). It could also mean compensation for wrongdoing or injury. In this sense, it often appeared in compounds, such as man-bote, compensation by a person to somebody he had injured, or the later thief-bote, a bribe or reparations by a thief to avoid prosecution. If you were bootless, you were without help or remedy or couldn’t be compensated. The meaning evolved into the figurative sense of something fruitless, unprofitable, or to no useful purpose. Charles Dickens used it this way in A Tale of Two Cities: “‘Well!’ said that good-natured emissary, after a full half-hour of bootless attempts to bring him round to the question.” But the most famous example is probably that in Shakespeare's Henry IV in which the Bard puns on two senses of the word: Glendower: Three times hath Henry Bolingbroke made head Against my power; thrice from the banks of Wye And sandy-bottom'd Severn have I sent him Bootless home and weather-beaten back. Hotspur: Home without boots, and in foul weather too? How scapes he agues, in the devil's name." www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-boo2.htm |
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