- English translation
As useless as dried canal silt: no good for building and no good for patching cracks.
- Literal wording
Like the ruhrit (canal-bed silt): it neither builds nor stops up holes.
- Meaning and lesson
The saying compares a person to the loose, crumbly silt left on a canal bed once the water has dried up. It cannot be shaped into walls, and it cannot even be packed into cracks. Such a person offers no help either in making something or in mending damage.
The image also suggests a slack, formless character, someone without firmness, drive, or occupation. The speaker expects nothing from this person.
- When it is used
Use it to dismiss someone who contributes nothing, whether by building something new or fixing what is broken. It is a disparaging insult about a person's worth, not gentle teasing, suited to informal scorn of a spineless or ineffectual person and too cutting for polite description.
- Register
- Colloquial Arabic; disparaging
Cite or copy proverb
How this record reached us: Editorially sourced.
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