How About St. Never’s Day? Is St. Never’s Day Good For You?

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And you know, Grant, if you want to express skepticism that something’s never going to occur, you might say, yeah, that’ll happen when pigs fly.

And we say that without thinking, but, you know, it’s really picturesque, right?

I mean, you’ve lived on a farm.

Right.

Can you imagine? Majestic pigs soaring through the blue skies.

Majestic.

I hadn’t thought about that.

But yeah, we say in English when pigs fly, but there are expressions in other languages that are at least as clever and colorful.

There’s one in Tagalog that translates as when the crow turns white, when the heron turns black, which just means not going to happen.

Not going to happen.

Or in Hungary, you say when red snow falls.

And another one that I really like is that in a lot of European languages, they have an expression that translates as, that’ll happen on St. Never’s Day.

Yeah.

One of my favorites, St. Never’s Day.

Right.

St. Nimmerleinstag.

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