I have been trying laboriously to find an equivalent idiom or a catchy phrase to the one we have in Arabic مثل الأطرش بالزقة which simply means, “He is like a deaf man at a wedding procession”.
It is used when two or more people are talking about a specific topic and one person in that group (or someone who happens to join in) is completely ignorant about the topic and cannot follow the conversation. That person might then say, “I’m like a deaf man at a wedding procession”, or the others may say it about him.
I was just curious if there was any similar idiom in English; or if not, is there anything in vicinity of it, or some catchy phrase which people usually say or any casual sayings?
Best Answer
The most common figure of speech in a situation like the one you describe is to say that something (a conversation, a topic, or especially a joke) is (or goes) over someone’s head, as in sense 1 of this Oxford Dictionaries entry:
If the person who does not understand the conversation is the one saying it, it will often be in a slightly self-deprecating form, such as:
If others say it about him, they are quite likely to come off as fairly condescending.
From the notion of something passing over one’s head come two closely related gestures that are often used together:
Once again, this is seen as slightly self-deprecating if done by the person who does not understand, and definitely offensive if done by others.
An alternative to expressing that something goes over one’s head is to state that one is out of one’s depth (sense 1.2), an extended sense of a phrase meaning ‘standing in water that is too deep’:
This is a bit more polite and less self-deprecating; it’s also less of an idiom and more of a straightforward collocation. Something like the following is a quite polite way of saying that you don’t understand the topic: