To be sick to the back teeth
Today's idiom comes from a song by the band Mňága &Žďorp and it's called "Je tma" - "It's Dark". The phrase we'll learn today is: "mít toho plné zuby" and the sentence you should look out for is: "už toho má taky plný zuby"...
The song is about members of a family who live separate lives. The mother in the family is fed up with the routine - "už toho má taky plný zuby". To "mít toho plné zuby" means to be fed up with something or those of you in Britain or Australia would also say to be "sick to the back teeth" of something. That actually comes closest to the literal meaning of the Czech phrase. When you say "mám toho plné zuby" it literally means "I have my teeth full of it" (the Czech word for teeth is "zuby". A male dentist is a "zubař", a female dentist a "zubařka"). Here's the phrase for you again in song:
You may be wondering why the singer says "plný" instead of "plné". As is common in modern Czech pop songs, he uses the colloquial form.
Two other variations of the phrase that are in slang are "mám toho plný kecky", the literal meaning of which is "I have my sneakers full of it" and "mám toho plný brejle", meaning "I have my glasses or spectacles full of it". Here, I should add that the formal word for glasses is "brýle" and not "brejle".
And that's the end of this edition of SoundCzech. Join us again next week when we'll be back with another new phrase. Until then, "doufám, že toho nebudete mít plné zuby" - I hope you won't be sick to the back teeth of whatever you're doing.
