You can’t pick a naked man’s pocket.
That’s nature’s pocket.
The prison wallet
“Make sure he doesn’t pick your pocket!”
Challenge accepted.
You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit
You can make cattle feed out of it though.
You can’t paint the Mona Lisa with crayons.
Kind of related to yours, “You’re putting lipstick on a pig”
In Australia there’s “you can’t polish a turd”
But you can roll it in glitter
We use this one also
Probably the closest in Irish is “is deacair olann a bhaint de ghabhar” (it’s hard to get wool from a goat)
Depends where you live I guess. Mohair and cashmere come from goats.
In the US there’s the saying “you can’t squeeze water from a stone”
I always heard it as blood from a stone, but yeah.
In Danish we have “you can’t cut the hair off a bald guy”
deleted by creator
I guess we use “Making gold from straw” (German).
Isn’t there literally a German fairy tale about someone able to make straw into gold?
Yes, that’s where it’s from.
You can’t polish a turd.
Having looked at some of the reports I have to clean up, I can tell you that yes, in fact, you CAN polish a turd
You CAN polish a turd but it’s still shit
You can’t polish a turd; you can roll it in glitter.
I dunno, man… Look up coprolite. You can absolutely polish them.
Polish - „you can’t make a whip out of shit” „z gówna bicza nie ukręcisz”
I think this takes home the prize for weirdest.
I can sure as hell try
I like this one
I imagine it wouldn’t hurt as much as a whip, but probably equally intimidating.
“You can’t get blood from a stone” is classic in the US. “No more juice from the squeeze” is another variant.
How is that even similar?
How is it not? The euphemisms all mean you “cant get X from Y.”
Both of my examples mean exactly that.
“You can’t make a silk purse from sows ear” means you can’t make something nice from rubbish. “You can’t get blood from a stone” means attempting something difficult, if not impossible and futile”. E.g. “trying to get my kids to tell me about their school day is like trying to get blood from a stone.” It doesn’t matter how hard I try I get nothing.
A sow is a female pig, which doesnt produce silk at all. Attempting to get silk from it would be difficult, if not impossible and futile. It wouldn’t matter how hard you try, you would get nothing.
You can get as much silk from a sows ear as you can get blood from a stone. I dont see much differnce, but i guess the sows ear phrase requires more culture context if it means “you can’t get something nice from rubbish.”
One of the versions I have heard about this analogy comes from corn silk. The corn fed to pigs is usually of the lowest quality, and if you use the silk from cheap ears of corn, you won’t be able to make a useful purse out of it
cuir síoda ar ghabhar; is gabhar fós é
巧妇难为无米之炊 – “even the cleverest house wife cannot cook without rice”.
The proverb you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear means you can’t create a fine product from inferior materials.
I’d argue it’s closer to 朽木不可雕^. 巧婦難為無米之炊 (巧妇难为无米之炊) is more like you can’t make stuff without the necessary requirements.
^朽木不可雕: Lit. Rotten wood can’t be carved, metaphorically You can’t teach a student that is too dumb.
… Well actually no. Upon looking into these 3 idioms further while composing this comment, I leaned more and more towards that 巧婦難為無米之炊 is actually closer. Why? Because 朽木不可雕 applies only to humans and it puts more of a focus on the rotten wood (aka the dumb student).
I guess this comment was kind of useless lol but I decided to post it anyway because I put in way too much effort
it should just be deleted
