Is your child constantly bouncing off the walls and seemingly needing endless energy to run? If this is the case, you could use Italian to describe him or her as “full of mercury.” The exact idiom is as follows:
You have mercury on you
Irritable/energetic/restless
mercuryliterally meaning “living silver”, is an Italian mercury, an alternative name for liquid metallic mercury. This idiom compares a lively, restless, or energetic person (similar to what English speakers call a “live wire”) to the characteristic of mercury scattering in all directions in tiny, elusive droplets.
Sometimes I wake up in a bad mood, sometimes I feel like I have mercury on me!
Sometimes I wake up in a bad mood, sometimes I feel like a live wire!
Heather Broster is a graduate with honors in linguistics from the University of Western Ontario. She is an aspiring polyglot, fluent in English and Italian, as well as varying degrees of fluency in Japanese, Welsh and French. Originally from Toronto, Heather has lived in several countries, notably Italy for six years. Her main research areas are language acquisition, education and bilingual teaching.
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