What's an idiom for "two people have two drastically different appraisals of an event they were a part of"?
For example, two people on a date. One thinks it was great and hopes for another, and the other thinks it was terrible.
idiom-requests
What's an idiom for "two people have two drastically different appraisals of an event they were a part of"?
For example, two people on a date. One thinks it was great and hopes for another, and the other thinks it was terrible.
Best Answer
This sounds like an example of the Rashomon effect. From Wikipedia (footnotes omitted):
So for example if A and B go on a date, A might remember that the food was terrific and they were incredibly witty, but then B got increasingly tipsy and there was a weird digression into French art criticism that tanked the whole date; while B remembers that the food violated their dietary restrictions and A kept telling total groaners, but the wine was terrific and there was a fascinating conversation about French art criticism that really made them want to see B again. And the waiter might primarily remember that A and B totally stiffed him on the tip in spite of ordering three appetizers, two desserts, and three bottles of wine.
To address the request for an idiom: The term Rashomon, applied as an adjective to various nouns, has come to be an idiom1 for this kind of encounter. For example (bolding added; other emphasis original):
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the use has picked up quite a bit in US news reports in the past few years.
1 I am taking "idiom" here to mean "an expression whose meaning is not predictable from the usual meanings of its constituent elements" (Dictionary.com), since the usual meaning of something like "Rashomon encounter" would be "an encounter with Rashomon".