[Lexicog] the pen dropped - the penny dropped (was "accusatory observation")

[Fritz Goerling]

How would you  render the idiom "the penny dropped" in your language?

(When the penny drops, someone belatedly understands something that everyone
else has long since understood.)

German: der Groschen ist gefallen (same idea as in English)

Fritz Goerling



  My wife says that in Cantonese you would say "the pencil dropped".

  I don't have any Amele speakers handy to check with but I think you would
  use an impersonal experiential verb to say this which would be equivalent
to
  "the pencil dropped" or "the pencil was dropped by you".

  I notice that the Collins COBUILD gives two senses for "drop" for a vt
under
  superordinate "release": the first is "let fall by mistake" and the second
  is "let go of deliberately". But both these senses are expressed in the
same
  way lexico-syntactically, i.e. with an actor and undergoer argument. Which
  means when I say "You dropped your pen" I could mean either you did it
  deliberately or accidentally. I think I could also use this to express
  another sense. If the teacher was walking across the classroom and the pen
  fell from his pocket, say, and he didn't notice, I would say, "You dropped
  your pen" meaning 'the pen fell from you'. In the first context if I said
  "the pen dropped" it wouldn't be polite; it would be very odd, like I was
  trying to say the dropping of the pen had nothing to do with the person
  holding it - or maybe I am talking about another pen ...


  John Roberts



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