Cover the Sun With a Finger

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Sam from Westfield, Indiana.

Hi, Sam. Welcome.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

So I work in human services, and I had a client’s mother use the phrase, you cannot cover the sun with a finger. And it’s one of those phrases that you can kind of figure out what it means, but I wanted to know if you had any stories for the origin of it.

What was the situation where it came up?

We were trying to work on a few things, a few more than she intended to, so just more than she was able to work on at one time.

So you had a lot of problems and she bit off more than she could chew.

Only so much time.

And only so much time.

And so the expression was, you cannot cover the sun with one finger?

Mm—

Yes.

Okay.

What else can you tell us about the person who used this expression?

She’s from Puerto Rico, but I looked it up and it looked like it may have come from Cuba.

Martha, you speak some Spanish, Argentinian Spanish. Did you know this one?

Not from Argentina, but I know the phrase, tapar el sol con un dedo.

Tapar el sol con un dedo, to cover the sun with a finger.

Yeah, and I think the idea is that you’re deluding yourself if you think that you can hide the sun just by holding up your finger. It may look that way to you, but you’re not extinguishing the sun.

Right, so there’s two notions of this. One is you’re solving the problem for yourself, but not for other people.

Right. But the other thing is, it’s just kind of a band-aid on a really big problem, right?

Right.

A tiny fix that doesn’t really solve it for everyone.

It’s not just Cuban or Puerto Rican. It is used throughout the Spanish-speaking cultures.

I’ve found versions of this in Cuba and Puerto Rico, but also in Mexico and Spain and Uruguay and Paraguay and some other Spanish-speaking countries.

So you will find it throughout the Spanish-speaking countries.

But, you know, I’ve found a variant of this in other countries where it’s you can’t cover the sun with the palm of your hand. But this is from a different set of countries, and they tend to be Muslim countries.

So Nigeria, North Africa, Serbia.

I’ve found that as far back as 1915.

No doubt in both cases these expressions are much older than we think that they are. And it’s exactly the same kind of use.

Is all about you’ve bitten off more than you can chew or you’re trying to fix a big problem with a small solution in every single case. So I do tend to see these being used very often these days in political contexts where opponents are accused of treating big problems in small ways.

So they have a weird context to them where they’re not the kind of thing you’d say. Typically these days, I don’t see them in fiction.

I haven’t seen them very often in fiction, so I don’t know.

I don’t have a sense of it as an English saying.

No, me neither.

No, I hadn’t heard it at all.

Biting off more than one can chew is kind of a good translation, but it doesn’t work perfectly because it doesn’t encompass all the different ways that these are used.

Any idea to which came first, the palm or the finger?

No, I don’t know.

They’re hard to track because I don’t have any Serbian or the other languages. I’ve only found these in translation from these other languages in English.

So this is the best that I can do for you.

Sorry, bud.

That’s all right.

I appreciate the help.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for calling.

Really appreciate it.

Okay.

Thank you.

Have a good day.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We know you’ve had an encounter at your job where somebody said something that mystified you, and it’s a thing. It’s an expression. It’s an idiom or an aphorism or a saying. Call us, and we’ll try to sort it out.

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