Expressões idiomáticas com a palavra EYE

Hi, everyone. I was wondering if there would be something interesting about the word eye I could share with you today. It turned out that not only it is a good source for idioms, but a spectacularly huge one. I stumbled upon so many interesting idioms that we use both in Portuguese and English that I haven't yet made up my mind about which ones I'll be speaking of today. But let's start with the idiom "eyes are bigger than one's stomach."

That one is very intuitive for us brazilian because we also say that in Portuguese. Our translation for that would be down to the letter like: "seus olhos são maiores do que seu estômago / você come com os olhos". I think everybody's been in a situation where accuses someone of being greedy or has been accused himself. Imagine you go out to a self-service restaurant and take a friend along. There you find out how greedy your friend is because he fills his plate to the brim with every single option he puts his eye on. You see people's attention are being drawn towards you and your friend's plate and you couldn't be more embarrassed when you finally tell him: I think you've taken on more than you can consume. Your eyes are so much bigger than your stomach!

Our next idiom is a good one for those who are always getting into fights. You know that moment when you face someone down directly until one of the two finally looks away? When you do that, in an aggressive way of course, you're eyeball to eyeball with your enemy or rival. That's a good way of flexing your muscles by the way.

So let's move on to our third idiom "eye-opener". By the structure of that idiom that's mostly used as a noun we can already guess its meaning. It actually refers to those startling and shocking moments that leave your eyes literally wide open. It makes you more alert because it forces you into having a new perspective about something you didn't know much before. A travel for example can be an eye-opener because it makes you have a totally different mindset or point of view. It's pretty common to have the prejudice or maybe lack of knowledge about a place without going there personally and experiencing its reality in practice. I guess the most wronged place in that sense would be Africa. Of course, there's poverty and misery in Africa, I'm not saying the opposite, but it tends to be a very stereotypical point of view. So going down there can be a good eye-opener for all of us.

"To turn a blind eye" is our last idiom and it's a very popular one. It refers to those people that choose to ignore people doing especially wrong things. If it's for example a mother turning a blind eye to her children getting into trouble, she might be doing that to get away with her obligation of watching out for them. Politicians have the fame for turning a blind eye on social problems for instance. They deliberately ignore what's going wrong around them to prevent them from delivering on promises made publicly.