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Proverb

Russian equivalent

Meaning

Origin

1. A golden key can open any door.

Золотой ключик может открыть любую дверь.

Money opens any door.

This notion must be as old as money itself. The first person who is known to have written it down is the English playwright John Lyly, in Euphues and his England, 1580:

Who is so ignorant that knoweth not, gold be a key for euery locke, chieflye with his Ladye.

The proverb was the basis of the 1969 British comedy The Magic Christian, in which characters played by Peter Sellars and Ringo Starr use large amounts of money to bribe people to humiliate themselves by doing things completely out of character.

2. Be caught red-handed

быть пойманным с поличным

To be caught in the act of committing a misdemeanour, with the evidence there for all to see.

The Red Hand has long been a heraldic and cultural symbol of the northern Irish province of Ulster. One of the many myths as to its origin is the tale of how, in a boat race in which the first to touch the shore of Ulster was to become the province's ruler, one contestant guaranteed his win by cutting off his hand and throwing it to the shore ahead of his rivals. The potency of the symbol remains and is used in the Ulster flag, and as recently as the 1970s a group of Ulster loyalist paramilitaries named themselves the Red Hand Commandos.

Red-handed doesn't have a mythical origin however - it is a straightforward allusion to having blood on one's hands after the execution of a murder or a poaching session. The term originates from Scotland. An earlier form of 'red-handed', simply 'red hand', dates back to a usage in the Scottish Acts of Parliament of James I, 1432.

The earliest known printed version of 'red-handed' is from Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, 1819:

"I did but tie one fellow, who was taken redhanded and in the fact, to the horns of a wild stag."

16th and 17th century Scottish sources provide various examples of 'apprehended redhand', 'taken with redhand' etc. but the earliest known citation of the currently used 'caught red-handed' phrase is in the English novelist George Alfred Lawrence's work Guy Livingstone; or, 'Thorough', 1857:

My companion picked up the object; and we had just time to make out that it was a bell-handle and name-plate, when the pursuers came up - six or seven "peelers" and specials, with a ruck of men and boys. We were collared on the instant. The fact of the property being found in our possession constituted a 'flagrans delictum' - we were caught "red-handed."

3. Every dark cloud has a silver lining.

Нет худа без добра.

Every bad situation has some good aspect to it. This proverb is usually said as an encouragement to a person who is overcome by some difficulty and is unable to see any positive way forward.

John Milton coined the phrase 'silver lining' in Comus: A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634.

'Clouds' and 'silver linings' were referred to often in literature from then onward, usually citing Milton and frequently referring to them as Milton's clouds. It isn't until the days of the uplifting language of Victoria's England that we begin to hear the proverbial form that we are now familiar with - 'every cloud has a silver lining'. The first occurrence that is unequivocally expressing that notion comes in The Dublin Magazine, Volume 1, 1840, in a review of the novel Marian; or, a Young Maid's Fortunes, by Mrs S. Hall, which was published in 1840:

As Katty Macane has it, "there's a silver lining to every cloud that sails about the heavens if we could only see it."

'There's a silver lining to every cloud' was the form that the proverb was usually expressed in the Victorian era. The currently used 'every cloud has a silver lining' did appear, in another literary review, in 1849.

4. Red sky at night shepherds delight.

Если небо красно к вечеру, моряку бояться нечего.

This is the first part of the weather-lore rhyme:

Red sky at night - shepherds delight,
Red sky in the morning - shepherds warning.

When rhymes like that were established England had a primarily rural and maritime economy and weather was consequently of life and death importance.

This saying is very old and quite likely to have been passed on by word of mouth for some time before it was ever written down. There is a written version in Matthew XVI in the Wyclif Bible, from as early as 1395:

"The eeuenynge maad, ye seien, It shal be cleer, for the heuene is lijk to reed; and the morwe, To day tempest, for heuen shyneth heuy, or sorwful."

The Authorised Version gives that in a more familiar form:

"When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and louring."

There are many later citations of the saying in literature, including this from Shakespeare, in Venus & Adonis, 1593:

"Like a red morn, that ever yet betoken'd wreck to the seaman - sorrow to shepherds."

5. The pot calling the kettle black.

В чужом глазу соринку увидишь, а в своем бревна не заметишь.

The notion of a criticism a person is making of another could equally well apply to themselves.

This phrase originates in Cervantes' Don Quixote, or at least in Thomas Shelton's 1620 translation - Cervantes Saavedra's History of Don Quixote:

"You are like what is said that the frying-pan said to the kettle, 'Avant, black-browes'."

The first person who is recorded as using the phrase in English was William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, in his Some fruits of solitude, 1693:

"For a Covetous Man to inveigh against Prodigality... is for the Pot to call the Kettle black."

Shakespeare had previously expressed a similar notion in a line in Troilus and Cressida, 1606:

             "The raven chides blackness."