8 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
Afoot.
I think you meant "at hand"
:)
Comment by WatchEachOtherSleep at 28/01/2014 at 01:51 UTC
19 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This is a bit of a side-line, but thank you for saying that.
There's a site called Steenkolenengels[1] which is a collection of Dunglish (Dutch pidgin-English) that are literal translations from Dutch idioms, etc. Someone linked it somewhere and I was going through a few of the mistranslations. One of them was "There is something on the hand". Now, prepositions pretty much never translate properly between languages & the translation of the word *on* here is from the Dutch *aan*, which means *on* in some contexts, but it can also mean close to the English *at*. So, I made a comment saying that "There is something at the hand" isn't too far from "There is something at hand", so it's not really a very big mistake, compared to, say, "Make that the cat wise" which is a literal mistranlation of "Maak dat de kat wijs", meaning "I don't believe it for a second".
1: http://steenkolenengels.com/
Anyway, people were saying that "There's something at hand" isn't a correct English idiom meaning the same as "There's something at work" or "There's something afoot", though I was almost sure I'd heard it and used it regularly. I began to doubt it after Googling & concluded that I'd just misremembered or that it was a *Hiberno*-English colloquialism.
Anyway, I feel vindicated. Other people use it. The meaning is clear. Fuck everybody.
Comment by [deleted] at 27/01/2014 at 22:18 UTC
15 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]