Learn English – English equivalent of the Russian idiom “притянуть за уши” + opposite of “to abbreviate”

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I have encountered a couple of problems regarding the proper translation from the Russian language into English. Here are 2 cases:

  1. There's an idiom that literally translates as "pull the ears" ("притянуть за уши"), which means that you are in a situation where you experience the lack of proofs and instead of accepting the fact that you're wrong, you are trying to find a very shaky, sometimes even illogical argument in order to factitiously prove your 'correctness'.

  2. Is there any proper analog for the opposite action of "to abbreviate" or "to make an abbreviation"? The rough one (that I made up for myself) would be "de-abbreviate". I'm not sure whether you may use it in the context like that:

    I have no idea how to decipher the 'IBM' abbreviation, something about machinery and computers

    Here you see the word "decipher", which is completely doable and useful in Russian, but when I said that, native English speakers were quite amazed about it.

Best Answer

The idiom I would use is ‘grasping at straws’, for which Cambridge English Dictionary gives two definitions:

Grasp at straws:

  1. trying to find some way to succeed when nothing you choose is likely to work:

    • We searched all the backup tapes, trying to find the missing files, but we knew we were grasping at straws.

  2. trying to find a reason to feel hopeful in a bad situation:

    • I knew my mother was dying, but I was grasping at straws and denying reality.
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