Handkerchief Of Idioms.

Mark Liberman just posted about the French expression dans un mouchoir de poche. Basically, he was discussing the meaning that something like an election or sports event is going to be close, that is to say, the competitors are evenly matched. This meaning is extrapolated from the fact that a handkerchief is small, I guess. In Spanish, we have the expression el mundo es un pañuelo, or literally in English the world is a handkerchief, and it is meant to express roughly the same thing as the English expression "small world." I'm curious how far this spreads, and if anybody else has noticed this, or even if the two are directly related. Personally, I never really thought anything particular about a хустка or a handkerchief's size, but it does seem that un pañuelo must be something small.

One of my teachers once told me that you should never translate directly between Spanish and English, because they are deceptively similar. Of course this is true, and one should always translate the semantic notion, but over the years it's been surprising how often parallel idioms come up (though the different ones can be spectacularly fun and difficult to translate). I'll have to keep my eyes peeled from now on and start jotting some of these guys down.