Come up with other ways to say idioms

[StrangerCoug]

Here's how this game works: Somebody will come up with an English idiom. The object is to come up with other possible ways a language could convey something with the same (or at least a similar) meaning. You can come up with as many as you like, and when the good ones are exhausted, the game restarts with a new one. You may provide samples from your conlangs if that's what you want to do.

I'll start with a blessing and a curse and provide my own idea for it: "both a poison and an antidote".

[Pabappa]

OK Ive never beluieved this myself, I trhink its an Internet phenomenon, but probnabnly based in truth. "an orange and a toothpaste" beucaue everyone looooooves oranges but haaaaates toothpaste amnd they wanrt to belive the scariest things in the world are 500000 years old fruits andf modern human inventomns that are softy and squishy and resemble soap inmstead of knives & guns, but supposedlty when you combine them the toothpaste wins because you get a bad aftertaste. I relize toothpaste is a mass noun and orange is a count noin, but in Khulls it world make sense.,


since my conpeople, of course, do not have toothpaste, they use insyead squid and sauce,

xàma ka nătogi in Khulls, where Khulls is basically the culture that everyone else looks up to to admire. In Poswa itd be sampama wa natie, where natie is a loan but sampampa is native. WHy squid???? because =the sauce you cook squid with is yuimmmmmmy but the squid wins in the aftertaste

[Αυτοβοτα]

Greek provides φάρμακον "pharmakon" for something that is both poison and cure at the same time, a bitter medicine, or bitter pill as it appears in English. And in a single word! "Hair of the dog" relates to that last one a bit but is getting farther afield from the original.

Are we going to try to exhaust real-word versions of it first?

Let's try a new one, though, per the game. "Salt and salve." Think a wound or eyes.