- English translation
Like the old women at a wedding: they eat their fill, then make fun of the food.
- Literal wording
Like the old women of the wedding: eating and mocking.
- Meaning and lesson
The saying pictures elderly women at a wedding feast who eat everything set before them and then trade sly, teasing remarks about the very dishes they enjoyed. The joke lies in the contradiction between eating with appetite and mocking with veiled wit rather than open insult.
Applied to people, it criticises anyone who benefits from another's generosity and then belittles it through jokes and pointed hints. It marks such behaviour as ungrateful and two-faced. Its target is ingratitude toward hospitality, not older women or weddings in general; the wedding guests serve only as the traditional image.
- When it is used
Use it about someone who accepts food, favours or hospitality and then pokes fun at what they were given, especially guests who eat heartily and afterwards make sly jokes about the meal or the hosts. It carries a mocking, reproachful edge.
- Register
- colloquial
Cite or copy proverb
How this record reached us: Editorially sourced.
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