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 ;)
Haven't you ever been sent from the closet to the wall? Life doesn't go over roses.