Phrasebank Vol. I

DE German · informal · 4 of 6

ins Gras beißen

flippant, sometimes harsh

Word by word

into-the · grass · bite

Idiomatic sense

To die, said flippantly. The picture is a person falling face down and biting the grass. It shows up in jokes, in plot summaries, and in blunt talk. It is a poor choice beside a real, recent death, where it sounds heartless.

It is close to kick the bucket in register, and close to bite the dust in the picture.

Examples

  1. Der Schurke beißt am Ende ins Gras.

    The villain bites the dust at the end.

  2. In dem Film beißen am Schluss fast alle ins Gras.

    By the end of the film almost everyone is dead.

Equivalents

Marks say how far the other phrase travels with this one. How to read them.

  1. near

    Same flippant register. The English picture is a bucket, not the ground.

  2. near

    English

    bite the dust

    Closer in the picture: the body meets the ground. Often a little more violent, or more fictional, than a domestic death.

  3. near

    Spanish

    estirar la pata

    To stretch the leg. The everyday flippant Spanish for dying.

  4. near

    French

    passer l'arme à gauche

    To pass the weapon to the left. Jocular or euphemistic, and old-fashioned in a way the German phrase is not.

  5. near

    Chinese

    翘辫子

    Colloquial and irreverent. Fine in a joke, wrong at a funeral, like the German.

Notes

The second example's English says "is dead" because a roomful of grass-biting would pile the joke on too thick. The German can bear the repetition. That is the idiom doing its work.

Nothing here settles an origin. The words already show a body going down into the grass.

Sources

  • Standard colloquial idiom. Wording is original. Not a quotation from a dictionary.

Mentioned from