Craunching the marmoset may be the only way to relieve a hovercraft full of eels.
In 1855 Pedro Carolino set out to write a Portuguese/English phrasebook. Unfortunately Carolino didn't speak English... so he translated a French/English phrasebook into Portuguese, with the promising title, "English as She is Spoke." Hilarity ensued.
The unintentionally funny work was the pre-internet internet thing of its day, to the point that Mark Twain titled an essay making fun of American education, "English as she is taught."
The English idioms from "English as she is spoke" are famously weird... a few at random (not selected for weirdness)
Nothing some money, nothing of Swiss.
He sin in trouble water.
A bad arrangement is better than a process.
In the country of blinds, the one eyed man are kings.
To build castles in Espagnish.
Cat scalded fear the cold water.
To do the fine spirit.
With a tongue one go to Roma.
There is not any rnler without a exception.
Take out the live coals with the hand of the cat.
A horse baared don't look him the tooth.
And the best nonexistent common English idiom our language has to offer... "
To Craunch the Marmoset."
(By the standards of the other translated idioms in the book, "craunch the marmoset" is a fairly reasonable version of "spanking the monkey"... but I doubt an 1855 French/English phrasebook included "spanking the money," so we may never know what craunching a marmoset denotes.)
http://www.archimedes-lab.org/carolino.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_As_She_Is_Spoke
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A fine day to Craunch the Marmoset (Original post)
REP (18,310 posts) 
