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quarta-feira, 6 de março de 2013

A couple of expressions with the word rock

To rock the boat: If you try to take this idiom literally, you'd imagine someone in an actual boat trying to affect its balance by rocking it. But the meaning of this idiom goes beyond that concept. Imagine for example you're in a group discussion and, even though you're trying as hard as you can to preserve the harmony, there's someone else trying to take it away by playing off one against the other. You're so pissed off by that person that you end up telling him: Don't rock the boat! Can you imagine what's been just said? You just told him he shouldn't be trying to destabilise the group by making trouble. The same way that it happens to a real boat, if you rock the boat in any situation, you lose its balance.

The next idiom may not be a very polite thing to say. Actually it's used to describe somebody's intelligence in a very rude way. If you say someone is dumb as a rock, it means that besides having no common sense between you two, you think he's very very stupid. If it makes any easier to understand, in Portuguese we say it like "você é burro feito uma pedra".

Imagine you're in a very stormy relationship. You fight a lot, there's hardly a common sense and you think nothing else could happen to make it worse. Well, soon you find out you're very mistaken about that. Your partner has actually been cheating on you and just now you've discovered. When things like that happens and makes you feel like you've reached a point in life or in a relationship where things could not get any worse, you could say you've hit rock bottom. In Portuguese, we'd say "você está no fundo do poço".

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