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> Like the duck of Ngechur, he became industrious after growing old. The idiom is applied to a person who has more or less vegetated into maturity and old age and who, already far past his prime, suddenly tries without success to do all the things he might have done when younger. It may be used with reference to an elder who tries to be a dandy. |
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> I build it and you destroy it? May be applied to a person who feels his aims or projects are being destroyed by the actions of another. |
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> You're like a fish bait which can be eaten or pecked from the top and bottom. You don't know what to do because chores keep coming in from left and right. |
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> Like his father, for he ate his father's premasticated food. Applied to a child by adoption, with the implication that the adopted child resembles his adoptive father |
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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. |
