- English translation
Puffed up like a featherless festival rooster, bare yet full of swagger.
- Literal wording
Like the rooster of the Fifty Days: naked and strutting.
- Meaning and lesson
The image is a rooster featherless by nature, fattened during the fifty days before Sham el-Nessim, not the hot wind also called khamasin. Such birds grow bigger than others and puff themselves up, yet have no feathers. The strutting looks absurd next to the bare body.
Applied to people, "naked" means destitute, with nothing to cover oneself. The saying ridicules someone poor and needy who still boasts, struts, and acts superior, pointing to the gap between such a person's arrogance and their empty circumstances.
- When it is used
Use it scornfully of a penniless person who swaggers and looks down on others despite having nothing. Aimed at someone directly, it is a put-down, suited to teasing or criticism in everyday colloquial speech, not polite or formal settings.
- Region
- Egypt
- Register
- Colloquial Egyptian Arabic
Cite or copy proverb
How this record reached us: Editorially sourced.
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