Small Dutch connotation: Dutch proverbs is something children are taught in primary school, and we get saddled with a pretty large amount of them, but don't expect a Dutch person to ever say "ah well, the herring hangs by his own gills". At least I've never heard anyone say that. Even though this painting (and others) are used for teaching proverbs.
Many of these proverbs are rather archaic, and I suspect a good bunch of them to have never been in popular use at all (some of them are really far fetched/oddly specific).
Dutch speakers not proficient at English often try to translate Dutch proverbs literally into English, often with hilarious results. It's a good reminder of why it's so hard to have computers translate language. Even if you know your grammar perfectly, and you know the meaning of every word, you can still utterly fail to understand the meaning of a sentence.
"Man, my boss is really making me look for nails at low water"
Said the Dutch, meaning to say that his boss is making him do annoying work with apparent low value. It stems from back when nails were relatively precious, and used in shipbuilding. Bosses would make their shipbuilders wait for ebb and then have them seek for the nails they dropped while working on the ships.
Are you stabbing the dragon with our language? Quite a lot of proverbs are still used where I work and sometimes during a presentation it leads to strange remarks, only funny to the dutch people. Such a a person then falls through the basket as a true dutchman, the ape comes out of the sleeve so to say. The presenter then often laughs like a farmer with a tooth ache. But who cares, who laughs the last, laughs the best.
Haven't you ever been sent from the closet to the wall? Life doesn't go over roses.
Besides van Gaal being famous for translating the rich Dutch proverbs into English/German there is some merit to the first post. I've notices since moving from Zeeland (province, sparcely populated) to the Randstad (Near The Hague, city style) some years ago, that in Zeeland we used a lot more proverbs in common speaking language than people do in the 'city'.
Using control F, I did not find this idiom on the Wikipedia page we are discussing. So I went looking.
I tried to google "stabbing the dragon" and initially only found an English urban dictionary entry advising me that "slaying the dragon" is an idiom for sleeping with a very unattractive women. More digging got me this reddit discussion: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/znsep/reddit_what... which suggests that it means mocking someone.
Indeed "stabbing/sticking the dragon with" means "to make fun of".
This all reminds me of an episode of TNG where Picard has to communicate with a race that only speaks in proverbs, sentences that only make sense when you know their historical context or metaphors (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Tamarian_language).
BTW, an Austrian colleague just a couple of days ago told me (in Dutch) "Life is not a little lark." Which has no meaning at all to me but we started using it. Funny stuff :) In University we actually made a sport out of literally translating dutch proverbs which is why I "shook my original comment out of the sleeve" so quickly (Note that I didn't "suck it out of my thumb", that would mean I made it up whereas "shaking it out of the sleeve" means I came up with it without effort).
I didn't want to wake sleeping dogs. Now I dug this hole and fell in myself and got schooled by the best horse in the stable. I guess I am really lodged in the monkey ;)
My personal favorite : "That's the earth of the beast". In dutch it's "Aard van het beestje" which loosely translates to "it's in its/their nature". During a large conference in Cannes, France I heard a Dutch researcher say it during his presentation with a room full of puzzled faces as a result.
Many of these proverbs are rather archaic, and I suspect a good bunch of them to have never been in popular use at all (some of them are really far fetched/oddly specific).
Dutch speakers not proficient at English often try to translate Dutch proverbs literally into English, often with hilarious results. It's a good reminder of why it's so hard to have computers translate language. Even if you know your grammar perfectly, and you know the meaning of every word, you can still utterly fail to understand the meaning of a sentence.
"Man, my boss is really making me look for nails at low water"
Said the Dutch, meaning to say that his boss is making him do annoying work with apparent low value. It stems from back when nails were relatively precious, and used in shipbuilding. Bosses would make their shipbuilders wait for ebb and then have them seek for the nails they dropped while working on the ships.