- English translation
"May disaster take you, woman!" he said. "Then it lands on your head, man," she answered.
- Literal wording
He said: "A calamity has come to you, O woman!" She said: "On your head, O man!"
- Meaning and lesson
The proverb exposes the folly of wishing harm on someone whose troubles you will end up carrying. The husband's words are a curse, not a report, and the wife's retort turns them back on him: in the household the proverb assumes, where a husband bears his wife's misfortunes, any disaster that befalls her becomes his burden.
More broadly, it applies to anyone who hopes for a misfortune whose costs would rebound onto the one hoping for it. It warns that, where lives and responsibilities are intertwined, ill will directed at a dependent or partner tends to circle back to its source, rather than stating a general rule about marriage.
- When it is used
Use it when someone curses or wishes trouble on a person whose hardship would inevitably fall back on the wisher. It suits pointing out, with dry humor, that a spiteful wish is self-defeating because the two parties' fortunes are bound together.
- Register
- Colloquial dialectal Arabic, in the form of a short exchange between two speakers
Cite or copy proverb
How this record reached us: Editorially sourced.
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