Two examples of adynaton, the rhetorical term for playful exaggeration suggesting that something will never happen, involve animals’ tails. One German expression translates as “It’ll happen when the hounds start barking with their tail,” and a Latvian one translates as “It’ll happen when an owl’s tail blooms.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “More Impossible Events”
I’ve been looking at adenotons around the world, those phrases that describe impossible events.
And a couple of them involve animals and their tails. In German, if you want to say that something is never going to happen, you might say the equivalent of, it’s going to happen when the hounds start barking with their tail. And in Latvian, you would say, it’s going to happen when an owl’s tail blooms.
I’m trying to picture what that would look like.
What country is it where that will happen when a camel’s tail reaches the ground?
Oh, I have never heard that one.
Yeah, I’ve heard that one, but I don’t know which country it is.
It must be one of the camel-rich countries, though, right?
Yeah, I was going to say.
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