When Pigs Fly and Las Vacas Vuelen

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. In English, if we’re talking about something that’s not going to happen, we might say it’s going to happen when hell freezes over or when pigs fly. But in Spanish, you can describe something impossible by saying it’s going to happen on the day when cows fly, el dia que las vacas vuelen.

And in Italy, it’s not cows or pigs flying improbably. It’s donkeys.

They say the equivalent of when donkeys fly.

And it turns out that there’s a fancy name for this rhetorical device.

It’s called an atonaton.

That’s A-D-Y-N-A-T-O-N.

Adenaton.

It comes from the Greek word that means impossible.

And atonatons go all the way back to antiquity.

And you’ll find them in lots and lots of languages around the world today.

Like in the Malay language, for example, they’ll say,

It’s going to happen when cats grow horns.

Cats get up to all kinds of trouble, but I wouldn’t put it past them.

Well, Grant, here’s one of my favorites.

It’s from Bulgarian.

It translates as, oh, yeah, that’ll happen when the pig in yellow slippers climbs the pear tree.

Not just any pig.

Not just any slippers, the pig in yellow slippers.

The pig in yellow slippers.

That’s fantastic.

So all around the world, I guess you’ll share a bunch of these later.

How did you know?

Yeah.

My favorite, of course, is the French, which I have an affinity for when chickens have teeth.

Well, don’t wait until chickens have teeth to give us a call, 877-929-9673.

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