I was scrambling through a deep canyon on Sunday on Snoqualmie’s South Fork and ended up at this beautiful quiet pool that looked very deep and had a very nice brookie that grabbed my thin mint streamer after a few casts.
I was reminded of an Afrikaans expression:
“Stille waters, diepe grond, onder draai die duiwel rond.”
It’s the Afrikaans equivalent of “Still waters run deep” but it doesn’t really translate that well. Literally it translates as: “Still waters, deep ground, beneath the devil goes round and round” – but it loses its punchiness in translation.
Afrikaans is a language with a rough history and I think because of this it’s rich with idiomatic expressions, some of which would make a sailor blush. [so I won’t share those with you].
Another one: “Hy kan nie ‘n bokkom braai nie.”
Translates as: “He can’t barbecue a dried and salted mullet” – doesn’t translate either because you have to have lived on the west coast of South Africa and seen what a bokkom looks like and experienced the sheer genius of west coast braais (bbq’s) to understand what an insult this really is.
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