Dear LINGUA FRANCA Sprachschule blog readers! From Berlin I welcome you to our 100th idiom post!

A classic barrel cuff

My colleague and I have been working hard to build a good relationship with one of our more difficult customers.  He’s a very sensitive man, but after a lot of flattery we finally had him at the point where he wanted to sign a contract for a big new deal with us. But at the final meeting my colleague made a stupid joke and we were told that he wouldn’t be doing business with us any longer. One off-the-cuff (spontan) comment and thousands of euros as well as many hours of work disappeared!

The origin of this idiom seems to come from the old practise of writing notes on detachable and disposable cuffs. In other word, if you forgot to bring paper to write on, you wrote on your cuff. Therefore something off the cuff was created without careful planning or preparation.

For an example of this old cuff-writing practise, have a look at what Charlie Chaplin does at about the 30 second mark in the video below. And then watch the rest, it’s a classic…

Over the last decade my friend Geoff has worked for over a dozen companies in eight countries around the world. To me it sounds absolutely exhausting. But as he says – a rolling stone gathers no moss (Wer rastet, der rostet)

This idiom has, of course, been immortalized by „The Rolling Stones“, who can’t have known how prophetic their band name would be when they chose it. So to celebrate the weekend, here are the grandfathers of rock celebrating themselves:

When our biggest client threatened to cancel their contract with us and go to another supplier, our R&D department came up with an amazing innovation just in time. It convinced the client to stay with us. Necessity is the mother of invention (Not macht erfinderisch)

Versions of this phrase have been around since Plato’s Republic, but the first actual use of the exact phrase comes from Richard Franck who used it in his book Northern Memoirs, calculated for the meridian of Scotland  in 1658.

The phrase was re-popularised in the 1960s when Frank Zappa named his jazz/rock band The Mothers of Invention.

Our head of R&D suddenly stopped coming to work in the middle of last year. After some weeks he was replaced by a new member of staff who took over his role, but the company made no announcement about what had happened to his predecessor. Some months later I heard through the grapevine (mir hat es jemand zugezwitschert) that he had taken a job with a competitor in China. He had also stolen the technical plans for the major new product development he had been working on and given them to his new company.

This idiom is of course best known from the old Motown song by Gladys Knight & the Pips, which was later covered by Marvin Gaye, Creedence Clearwater Revival and many others. See the video below for a very theatrical live version by Marvin Gaye :