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AnimalMuppet 4 hours ago

OK, here's one: My wife grew up in Latin America. Sometimes, instead of saying "I knocked it over", they say what literally translates to "it fell itself to me". Same idea - it fell - but hey, not my fault, it just happened.

Here's another: "fíjese". It kind of means "you'd never guess what happened". It's like "something that was completely unpredictable and totally outside my control happened, and it negatively affected my ability to do what I was trying to do", except with a lot fewer syllables.

Here's one going the other way: I was talking to a systems engineer about a specific issue, and I said that "we might be able to sweep that under someone else's rug". He was from Russia, and didn't have "sweeping it under the rug" as an idiom, and so didn't know what sweeping it under someone else's rug might mean.

Now, none of these are things that you can't say in another language or culture. You can. They're just a lot more unwieldy to say, and so people express that idea a lot less frequently.