Professor McGonagall shot a sharp look at Dumbledore and said, "The owls are nothing next to the rumors that are flying around. You know what everyone's saying? About why he's disappeared? About what finally stopped him?"
This paragraph is excerpted from Harry Potter. I don't quite understand the sentence in bold. I figure it means: The owls are nothing compared to the rumors that are flying around or The owls (thing) are not important at all compared with the rumors flying around. But I am really not sure about it!
So, how should we understand the sentence?
Best Answer
Both Eddie's and Enguroo's answers are correct, but neither say why.
The easiest way to compare two things is to put them next to each other and have a look. Hence, the idiom is derived from the act of identifying differences in objects by placing them side-by-side and measuring: eg, which is taller/shorter, what colour the two objects are.
In the example, if you took all the owls that are (literally) flying around, and conceptually placed them next to all the rumours that are (metaphorically) flying around, you would see such a large difference in the count that the number of owls would look like nothing.