"Writing behind the ears"
Hello and welcome to our Czech language series in which we study the Czech language from head to toe. I hope you are all ears today because we are going to talk about - yes - the organ of hearing.
Hello and welcome to our Czech language series in which we study the Czech language from head to toe. I hope you are all ears today because we are going to talk about - yes - the organ of hearing. The Czech word is ucho. If Czechs use the irregular plural uši, they refer to human or animal ears. But ucho also means a handle, such as on a bag or a mug - or it can even mean an eye - the eye of a needle. In those cases the plural is perfectly regular - ucha.
We know what people mean if they say they are up to their ears in debt - po uši v dluzích. But Czechs can also be "up to their ears in love" - zamilovaní až po uši - or to use an English idiom - head over heels in love. That can be a good reason to grin from ear to ear - smát se od ucha k uchu.
If you don't do very well in an exam and you just about pass it, Czechs say they passed with their ears scraped - s odřenýma ušima - as if they had to crawl through a narrow tunnel, so narrow that they scraped their ears while trying to get through. Dog-ears, that is folded corners of pages in books, are "donkey-ears" in Czech - oslí uši. If someone is very clever and cunning, Czechs say - má za ušima - translated as "he has behind the ears". What it is that you are supposed to have behind your ears to make you extremely smart is not clear, though. I guess our forefathers must have meant the brain, but that is not really behind the ears but rather between them, isn't it. There is another similar idiom - zapiš si to za uši, or "write it behind your ears", meaning "don't forget it, remember it well".
And that's enough "ear" idioms for today. We hope you had time to remember at least some of them and that they did not just go in one ear and straight out the other - jedním uchem dovnitř a druhým ven. In case they did, there is always our website, www.radio.cz/english, where you can go through our programme again at your leisure. Till next time, na shledanou, bye-bye.
See also Living Czech.
