I spotted an expression I hadn’t seen before, out in the wild, on twitter
It’s pretty hard to tell what’s going on in the video because they talk over each other a lot (which seems to be quite common in Portuguese TV), but apparently the guy speaking at the beginning is Miguel Carvalho, a journalist at Visão and the younger but slightly awkward looking fella is Pedro Frazão, a vet who was recently elected as a member of the Assembleia da República, representing the right-wing populist “party”, Chega. Frazão accuses Carvalho of making false statements and Carvalho comes back with “It isn’t me who will be judged tomorrow for spreading fake news, it’s you”.
Leaving aside whether “I know you are but what am I” is the killer move the tweeter seems to think it is*, the last sentence of the tweet is where the juicy goodness is:
O veterinário foi à lã e saiu tosquiado
The vet went for the wool and got sheered
This seems like a really good way of describing when someone’s cunning plan backfires and they end up looking stupid. I had a look around to see if it was something he’d just made up, but it’s a fairly common expression and there are a few versions of it online. The version Priberam gives is “Ir buscar lã e vir tosquiado“.
In case you’re tempted to feel sorry for Frazão for being talked over and taunted like this, it’s worth pointing out that he’s a loathsome little weasel who deserves no sympathy whatsoever. He made headlines a while back, having a pop at Joacine Katar Moreira, the annoyingly woke member of the Assembleia in a smallish party called Livre.
She had put up a sticker on a door of her office saying “descolonizar este lugar” (decolonize this place). That’s quite annoying, but his response was worse. Shortly before she was expected to leave the Assembleia, he took a picture of the door with his fingers over the LO, leaving it saying “desconizar este lugar” which can only be translated as “decuntify this place”. In case that wasn’t enough douchebaggery, he sealed the deal with an emoji of a plane taking off, which I read as implying she should not only leave the Assembleia but also leave the country and go back to Guinea Bissau, where she was born. She responded by reporting him to the police. The whole thing was a fairly squalid episode, with him definitely the villain of the piece.
So I’m not wildly in favour of debates where people talk over each other and accusé each other of lying, but if anyone is going to be verbally roughed up on TV, it might as well be him.
LOL. Or as Frazão might put it, 🤚L
And the line in the tweet about getting sheered is gold. I will definitely use that in future.
* UPDATE – I seem to have misunderstood. Carvalho wasn’t just talking about the court of public opinion: Frazão really did face an actual court judgement on the following day for having defamed a fellow politician. This puts it in a different light – friends, we are witnessing a murder here, live on camera
Luso 