2025-04-14
53 分钟You're listening to Away With Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I'm Grant Barrett.
And I'm Martha Barnett.
In English, if we're talking about something that's not going to happen,
we might say it's going to happen when hell freezes over or when pigs fly.
But in Spanish,
you can describe something impossible by saying it's going to happen on the day when cows fly.
And in Italy, it's not cows or pigs flying improbably.
It's donkeys.
They say the equivalent of when donkeys fly.
And it turns out that there's a fancy name.
for this rhetorical device.
It's called an atonatin.
That's A-D-Y-N-A-T-O-N, adinotin.
It comes from the Greek word that means impossible.
And adinotins go all the way back to antiquity,
and you'll find them in lots and lots of languages around the world today.
Like in the Malay language, for example, they'll say, that's going to happen when cats grow horns.
Cats get up to all kinds of trouble.
I wouldn't put it past them.