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> Like the Bilimbi tree which, if not shaken, will not bear fruit. Applied to a person who does not fulfill their obligations without constant prodding or nagging. |
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> Water is without cost. Palauans bathe frequently; many will not miss a daily bath if at all possible. Bathing places are usually widened areas, natural or artificial (some elaborately paved with stone) in fresh-water streams. The phrase simply reminds another, probably a reluctant child, that he should bathe. |
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> If it is my lunch it can be divided, if it is yours then it cannot Two men habitually trapped fish in the same region of the lagoon. One would occasionally ask the other to join him at lunch, the other would always refuse. One day the man who refused arrived with no lunch. When the usual invitation was extended the man refused, saying that, anyway, he had no lunch. The invitation was insistently pressed until the reluctant one gave in. As they split the taro between them the one who shared made the above statement. The idiom is a mild rebuke of a retentive person |
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> Without looking afield, it was cut down behind the house. From the folk tale concerning Mesubed Dingal, the inventor of the Palauan kite (see also No. 73). After his wife had been kidnapped, he constructed a kite using feathers from all the birds of Palau and he needed also wood from an Edebsungel tree to fashion the body of the bird-kite. After looking all over Palau and being on the point of giving up, he found the tree he needed behind his own house. The saying may be applied to anyone who does things the hard way, or who goes far afield to find something which is close at hand. |
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> He's like Chelebesoi of Ngeriil, dead in a fishtrap not his own. A man named Chelebesoi (also the name of a fish) was robbing another man's fish trap when a head-hunting party came by and removed his head. He lost both his head and his reputation. The idiom may apply to one who gets hurt while trying to do someone else's job. |
