text:
Talk:teach grandma how to suck eggs

don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs

What the...? Davilla 00:55, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

 * It's a fairly common idiom. The individual words' meanings combined do not constitute the meaning of that phrase, and there's no shorter variant; thus the entry must be given the full title. Is that what you were asking? --Wytukaze 20:21, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

 * I've never heard it, so I wasn't sure what to think. I've seen idioms here, but the way this is worded it looks more like some sort of saying. It's certainly long enough that there could be variants. The insertion of "how" before "to" is an example, also omission of or substitutions for "your". In fact "grandma" is more prevalent on Google. Also, the example given suggests that it could in fact be shortened, doing without the negation. All together:
 * to teach grandma to suck eggs = To tell an expert how to do things
 * Davilla 23:47, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

 * Well, are these long idioms supposed to be on Wiktionary, or should we move them to single-word entries? Stevey7788 21:55, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

We have already accepted idioms and proverbs because they are more than the sum of the words in them. This one is well documented. The most famous writer to use it was Jonathan Swift. Eclecticology 07:41:42, 2005-07-29 (UTC)

Part of Speech
This is an idiomatic verb, not a proberb. ---> Tooironic 21:53, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Vulgar
I wanted to mark this as vulgar, but then I remembered “eggs” does not mean “balls” in English, as it does in Russian and Armenian. --Vahag (talk) 07:47, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Possible etymologies
Moved here from a transwiki page from 2012. Equinox ◑ 21:24, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

The origins of the phrase are not clear. The OED and others suggests that it comes from a translation in 1707, by J. Stevens, of Francisco de Quevedo (Spanish author): "You would have me teach my Grandame to suck Eggs"

“I remember my old schoolmaster, who was a prodigious great scholar, used often to say, Polly matete cry town is my daskalon. The English of which, he told us, was, That a child may sometimes teach his grandmother to suck eggs”
 * Its use was recorded in Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, published in 1749:

“But what am I about? If my grandmother sucks eggs, was it I who taught her?”
 * Letter from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Leigh Hunt, 8/15/1819:

"You see, Grandmama, before you extract the contents of this bird's egg by suction, you must make an incision at one extremity, and a corresponding orifice at the other." Grandmama's response is to the effect, "Dearie me! And we used to just make a hole at each end."
 * The phrase was used in the 1890s in a Punch magazine cartoon:

"To teach one's grandmother to suck eggs - To offer needless assistance; to waste one's efforts upon futile matters; especially, to offer advice to an expert. This particular expression is well over two hundred years old; it is just a variation of an older theme that was absurd enough to appeal to the popular fancy.
 * In "Hog on Ice" (Harper & Row, New York, 1948), Charles Earle Funk says:

"Go teach your grandmother to suck eggs! I've been handling guns like this, flintlock and caplock, since before you were born."
 * The phrase has been used in the movie The Big Country:

"I don't think you're happy enough! That's right! I'll teach you to be happy! I'll teach your grandmother to suck eggs! Now, boys and girls, let's try it again!"
 * The line was also used in the sixth episode of the first season of The Ren & Stimpy Show:

"The purpose of this exercise is to follow precise unnecessary directions issued by a higher HQ. You have been directed to be in possession of a fresh empty eggshell for no apparent reason. Simple issuance of tasks being insufficient in any anal-retentive, career-oriented, hopelessly bureaucratic military staff society, the staff of the higher HQ have issued the following instructions."
 * Egg sucking is the subject of this parody of a military instruction: How to Suck an Egg

"But suddenly Gollum remembered thieving from nests long ago, and sitting under the river bank teaching his grandmother, teaching his grandmother to suck — ‘Eggses!’ he hissed.
 * Sméagol instructed his grandmother, as related in the Riddle Contest in Chapter Five of The Hobbit:

The use of the phrase "Suck-egg" for "a silly person" dates back to 1609, in the OED.

title: Talk:teach grandma how to suck eggs


text:
polished

Adjective

 * 1) Made smooth or shiny by polishing.
 * 2) Refined, elegant.
 * 1) Refined, elegant.
 * 1) Refined, elegant.
 * 1) Refined, elegant.

Translations

 * Armenian:
 * Bulgarian: ,
 * Dutch:
 * Finnish:
 * French:
 * German:
 * Greek:
 * Hebrew: מְצֻחְצָח
 * Italian: ,
 * Latin: polītus
 * Romanian: ,
 * Russian:
 * Sicilian: pulizziatu
 * Ukrainian: поліро́ваний

 * Bulgarian: ,
 * Finnish: ,
 * Greek:
 * Italian:, , ,
 * Romanian:
 * Sicilian:

 * Irish:

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: polished


text:
bitterly

Etymology
From, , , from , , equivalent to. Cognate with 🇨🇬, 🇨🇬, 🇨🇬.

Adverb

 * 1) In a bitter manner.

Collocations
Some adjectives commonly collocating with bitterly:

Translations

 * Catalan:
 * Czech:
 * Esperanto:
 * Finnish:
 * French:
 * Galician: amargamente
 * German:
 * Gothic: 𐌱𐌰𐌹𐍄𐍂𐌰𐌱𐌰
 * Hungarian: epésen
 * Norman: améthement
 * Plautdietsch: bettalich
 * Portuguese: amargamente
 * Russian:
 * Spanish:

title: bitterly


text: aphorisms

title: aphorisms


text: Category:de:Mathematics

title: Category:de:Mathematics


text: Category:de:Sciences

title: Category:de:Sciences


text:
teme

Etymology

 * introduced by in 2008.

Noun

 * 1) A meme which lives in a technological artifact rather than the human mind.

Etymology
From, present active infinitive of.

Verb

 * 1) fear

Etymology 1
,, from , from.

Noun

 * 1)  topic, focus, matter
 * 2) document, text

Etymology 1
, present active infinitive of, through a intermediate.

Verb

 * 1)  to fear

Etymology 2
Inflected form of.

Etymology
.

Noun

 * 1) top, crown (of the head)
 * 2) top, apex

Etymology 1
.

Noun

 * 1)  technological meme

Noun

 * 1) tapir,

title: teme


text:
man-made

Adjective

 * 1) Created by people, as opposed to occurring in nature; artificial or synthetic.

Usage notes

 * See the usage notes about.

Translations

 * Bulgarian:, направен от човек
 * Chinese:
 * Mandarin: 人為的, 人造的, 人工的
 * Dutch: door mensenhanden gemaakt
 * Finnish: ihmisen tekemä, ihmisten tekemä,
 * French: ,
 * German:
 * Greek:
 * Hebrew:
 * Hungarian:, ember alkotta
 * Icelandic: manngerður,
 * Irish:, de dhéantús an duine
 * Japanese:
 * Malayalam: മനുഷ്യനിർമ്മിത
 * Norwegian:
 * Bokmål: menneskeskapt
 * Nynorsk: menneskeskapt
 * Polish: ,
 * Portuguese:
 * Romanian:
 * Russian: ,
 * Spanish:, hecho por el hombre
 * Swedish:
 * Turkish: insan mamulü, ,

title: man-made


text: hommes

title: hommes


text: fruits

title: fruits


text: Category:fr:Sciences

title: Category:fr:Sciences


text: virtues

title: virtues


text:
žardinijera

Etymology
From.

Noun

 * 1) jardiniere (large flowerpot)

title: žardinijera


text: emotions

title: emotions


text:
cheerfully

Etymology
From ; equivalent to.

Adverb

 * 1) In a cheerful manner.

Translations

 * Greek:
 * Ancient: ἱλαρῶς
 * Latin: hilariter

title: cheerfully


text: Category:eo:Mathematics

title: Category:eo:Mathematics


text:
жардинијера

Etymology
From.

Noun

 * 1) jardiniere (large flowerpot)

title: жардинијера


text: pieds

title: pieds


text: Category:eo:Sciences

title: Category:eo:Sciences


text:
саксија

Etymology
.

Noun

 * 1) flowerpot, plant container

Etymology
.

Noun

 * 1) a plant container
 * 2) a flowerpot
 * 3) jardiniere

title: саксија


text:
Wiktionary:Categorization/archive

filing drawer - discussions about categories

Categories don't work properly?
I was looking at Category:Check_translations (the list of entries that have translations that need to be checked) and noticed that it didn't look very long. I was sure I had added many more terms to the this category using the template (which expands to a discussion of how to clean up the translations and adds the entry to the "Check translations" category). Indeed, if I go to the template and click on "What links here", I get a much longer list. Why is this? It can't be that the category takes a long time to update; for example, checktrans was added to abortion on 28 June 2005, over two weeks ago, but it this entry still doesn't feature in the check translations category. I thought it might be a problem with a page having multiple categories, but that is not the case for "abortion".

Does anyone know why this isn't working properly? — Paul G 16:18, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

 * My theory. The "Abortion" article referenced the "checktrans" template, even thoug the name of the template was "Checktrans" - this was OK in the good old days. Then Abortion was moved to abortion - the system couldn't find the checktrans template for a couple of days until it was renamed to lowercase, and therefore abortion was not in the category. Now that everything is named properly abortion should get put in the category at its next save - the system won't look at it otherwise. I shall now try that out. Yes it worked. SemperBlotto 16:39, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

 * Thanks, well done for working that out. Any idea how we can generate a list of entries that suffer from the same problem?  What links here for Template:Checktrans (redirect =no) gives no results. — Paul G 16:56, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

 * I shall think on't. Many templates had to be moved to lowercase, and many had also to be edited to correct the case of the named category. SemperBlotto 17:01, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

 * Looking at this it seems clear that the 50ish entries from June 30th (before the template was moved) are the culprits, and each need a null edit. I'm firing them off now.  We'll see in a few minutes if I get 193 of them.  (Note edit history does not show up in recent changes for null edits.)  --Connel MacKenzie 21:21, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

 * Orrrr, maybe I'll have a browser crash from trying to edit 50 articles at once and decide someone else can chase these down.
 * This is pretty scary. I know I tend to notice when a template is red, but I wonder how many edits there have been between June 29th and now, where there were templates that include categories, spelled in lowercase (before that template was moved?)  I guess one thing to do would be to run through the Template namespace and make sure they are all have a lowercase first letter redirect.  At least then, the problem will stop getting worse.  --Connel MacKenzie 21:35, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

 * This seems to be quite a big "problem" - most entries from category:chemistry are missing for example. However, it is only a big "PROBLEM" if our users actually use categories to search for things - and I have no evidence that they do. SemperBlotto 22:08, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

 * I agree that this seems to be a less urgent "problem" than it first appeared to be. Even if an article is missing from a category, it is more likely that the article will simply be edited before being hunted down for a null edit.  --Connel MacKenzie 22:47, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

 * The slow updating of category links has been around for a long time, but a null edit does fix them up. I have had little to do with the  template but things there do tend to stay a long time.  I did do things to co-ordinate Category:Chemistry just yesterday and it all seemed to be going fine. Eclecticology 01:42, July 14, 2005 (UTC)

 * Before Brion got on the plane for Germany, I had him run the linksUpdate script. All categories via template that were depopulated during the lowercasing, that have had their templates since then converted to lower case, should now be repopulated.  There is a vauge notion it will be run once more, when all the templates are converted to lower case.  --Connel MacKenzie 14:21, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

 * OK, now the Chemistry category is populated, but shows in a random order. And when I add a new article (tannic acid) it doesn't appear. Eh? SemperBlotto 15:12, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

 * That is really weird! Can anyone look at Category:Chemistry and figure out how to fix this?  Gene Nygaard 12:58, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

 * My guess is that the ones showing need null edits (when this is done, they disappear from the list). Maybe when those needing this get below 200, it will start to work?  Or are there just too many items in this category for it to work at all?  Gene Nygaard 13:23, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

 * There seem to be two problems: 1) Terms listed as at some point in the past as back in that wrong section and 2) "(Next 200)" link on category page does not take you to the Next 200.  When articles get their null edits, they jump to their correct section.  I will try to add the navigation template when I get back here.  --Connel MacKenzie 16:01, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

 * Ec's edit of Template:Chemistry caused the problem. It wasn't at first apparent, as SemperBlotto had already fixed the template...so it looked like something more serious was broken - but it was not.  Yes, each of the items now in the "*" heading of Category:Chemistry needs a null-edit to move (back?) to their correct spots.  --Connel MacKenzie 17:38, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

 * I reported the (Next 200) bug here. --Connel MacKenzie 18:13, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Category titles
I've revised all category titles to begin with a Capital letter. (The only one that remains "law stubs" contains only transwikied articles, and will disappear once those articles are assimilated.) One effect of this will be to reserve categories for words in other languages to be listed together headed by their language code in lower case letters. I would also propose that the category titles for foreign language terms be structured to reflect their exact counterparts in the main English list.

Future category development for all languages should still be scalable. A language in which we have a small representation has no immediate need for the detailed subdivision that we have in English. It can be subdivided later when the contents have grown. Eclecticology 05:49, July 21, 2005 (UTC)

Category map
I have experimented a little with a category map. See Category:Food and Drink. Did I miss anything there? Can we start doing this for other subject areas? Eclecticology 23:50, July 21, 2005 (UTC)

 * More, please!

 * My take on categories (not that anyone asked) is to tag terms with the most specific category appropriate, and then build structures like this on top of those specific categories. There's nothing wrong with putting the same specific category in more than one general category.

 * The corollary is to keep cleaning up the old topic list, pushing terms down into their appropriate subcategories (e.g., the topology terms go in topology, not math). I had been doing this, but stopped pending resolution of the captialization issue.  That seems to be stablizing, so I may well go back.  -dmh 15:44, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

 * Looks great!! I will try to add on that... —Sally Ku 15:56, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

 * Even better would be to get Wiki software to generate it automatically - so it doesn't get out of date. SemperBlotto 16:00, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

 * These seem like perfectly reasonable subdivisions. Since Wikipedia has played with categories longer, I would expect w:Category:Food and drink to list the subcategories we might want?  Did you use that when building your list?  --Connel MacKenzie 22:22, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

 * And since I forgot to say it before: YES, more like this! I wonder what happened to By topic?  Is that the correct starting place for us then?  --Connel MacKenzie 22:50, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
 * To be perfectly honest, since I never had much to do with that page I had completely forgotten that it was there. Sorry, I'll some thought to the possibility of co-ordinating the two approaches. Eclecticology 08:30:34, 2005-07-23 (UTC)

title: Wiktionary:Categorization/archive


text:
направити

Etymology
From.

Verb

 * 1)  to do, commit
 * 2)  to make, create, produce

Etymology
From. Compare 🇨🇬.

Verb

 * 1) to direct
 * 2) to send, to refer, to route
 * 3) to sharpen
 * 4) to tune
 * 1) to sharpen
 * 2) to tune
 * 1) to tune

title: направити


text:
правити

Etymology
.

Verb

 * 1) to lead

Etymology
. . Cognates include 🇨🇬 and 🇨🇬.

Verb

 * 1)  to lead
 * 2)  to govern
 * 3)  to follow, observe

Etymology
.

Verb

 * 1)  to make, create
 * 2)  to cause (damage, trouble, inconvenience etc.)
 * 3)  to fake, pretend
 * (with adjective) Неки људи се праве паметни. — Some people pretend to be smart.
 * (with + subordinate clause) Правим се да то не прим(ј)ећујем. — I pretend not to notice it.

Etymology
, from, from. . Cognate with 🇨🇬, 🇨🇬, 🇨🇬, 🇨🇬, 🇨🇬, 🇨🇬.

Verb

 * 1)  to rule, to govern
 * 2)  to correct
 * 3)  to do, to perform, to carry out, to manage
 * 4)  to direct, to drive, to steer
 * 5)  to go, to head, to be headed
 * 6)  to straighten

title: правити


text:
praviti

Etymology
.

Verb

 * 1)  to make, create
 * 2)  to do, cause, deal (damage, trouble, inconvenience etc.)
 * 3)  to fake, pretend
 * (with adjective)
 * (with + subordinate clause)

title: praviti


text: Template:userpage

title: Template:userpage