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Tiếng Việt

Beat around the bush

To avoid saying what you really mean.

Nói vòng vo Tam Quốc.

Nói quanh co, không đi thẳng vào vấn đề.

Also said in Vietnamese

  • Nói gần, nói xa, chẳng qua nói thật.

Beat around the bush

Examples

  • Stop beating around the bush and tell me how much it costs.

    Đừng nói vòng vo Tam Quốc nữa, nói cho tôi biết nó giá bao nhiêu.

  • He beat around the bush for ten minutes before admitting he had lost the file.

    Anh ta nói vòng vo mười phút rồi mới thừa nhận đã làm mất tập tài liệu.

In Popular Culture

  • Speech

    One thing I like about the California Lieutenant Governor is he doesn't beat around the bush; you know what's on his mind.

    Một điều tôi thích ở ông Phó Thống đốc California là ông ấy không nói vòng vo; ông ấy nghĩ gì thì ai cũng biết.

    Bill Clinton

    Remarks at a Democratic Leadership Council National Conversation in Baltimore, Maryland (1999)

Origin

In short

In a hunt the men who thrashed the undergrowth to drive the birds out were not the men waiting to catch them.

Hunting parties employed beaters, whose work was to move through cover striking the bushes so that whatever was inside broke and flew toward the nets or the guns. Going at the bush directly was the wrong move: it scattered the birds in every direction at once, and in country that held boar it could be considerably worse than that.

The expression is in English by the fifteenth century, and already figurative — it meant approaching a subject from the edges rather than walking up to it. The older form is beat about the bush; beat around the bush is the American variant, and now the more common one.

The hunt made a virtue of the indirect approach, because indirect was the technique that worked. The idiom kept the indirection and dropped the virtue, and now names only the delay.

Topics

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