The Bangladeshi idiom translated as oiling your mustache in anticipation of the jackfruit tree bearing fruit roughly matches English don’t count your chickens before they hatch. The image depends on cultural context: jackfruit is juicy, a mustache might be oiled before eating so the fruit won’t stick, and the tree hasn’t borne fruit yet. The example comes from a Reddit discussion of idioms from other languages, where literal translations often need context before their efficiency becomes clear. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Bangladesh’s “Oiling Your Mustache in Anticipation of the Jackfruit Tree Bearing Fruit” Means “Don’t Count Your Chickens””
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett. I’ve been browsing a great discussion thread at Reddit.
You know, Reddit, it’s this social networking, social linking site where people…
Yeah, R-E-D-D-I-T, right?
That’s right. People post stuff that’s cool, they vote it up or down, and then the popular stuff kind of rises to the top.
Well, one of the links that rose to the top is a link that features idioms from other languages and translates them into English.
And this is an astonishing list of idioms because the cultural things that you need to understand in order to grab these idioms are vast.
The top one at this minute, and I say at this minute because the voting could mean that this one could drop off the top, is from a fellow in Bangladesh who writes about an idiom relating to mustaches and jackfruit.
And the idiom goes like this: oiling your mustache in anticipation of the jackfruit tree bearing fruit.
I always say that.
And more or less it means don’t count your chickens before they hatch, right?
That’s what we might say.
But oiling your mustache?
Yeah, and he explains, and it’s great.
It’s a little like explaining a joke so that people understand why it’s funny, but bear with me here, okay?
So first of all, you love jackfruit.
Apparently they’re very yummy, right?
Okay.
And second of all, you have a mustache that if you ate a jackfruit, you would get some of the juice in your mustache, okay?
True, but don’t tell everybody.
One has a mustache.
One has a mustache.
The bleach is working.
Don’t worry about it.
And then the third thing is you oil your mustache before you eat so that the jackfruit doesn’t stick, right?
And so then the fourth thing is what’s happening is anticipation of having the jackfruit, which aren’t ripe yet.
You’re oiling your mustache anyway so it’ll be ready when the jackfruit are ripe.
And that’s the whole thing about this idiom from Bangladesh.
It’s wonderful.
Again, it is oiling your mustache in anticipation of the jackfruit tree bearing fruit.
So if you have all that context, it’s actually a very efficient way to say something, right?
But you need the context.
Otherwise, you spend four minutes of an intro on a radio show explaining it.
There’s a whole ton of these.
We’ll link to them on the website, and later in the show, I’ll share some more.
Oh, man.
This is the show where we talk about language and idioms and word origins and writing well and slang and the weird things they say in other parts of the country.
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