I’m Professor Dave, and you’re an animal.
Even more so than with English, Italian has idioms for everything, and there are a lot
of idiomatic expressions that compare human qualities to animals.
This is not completely foreign to English speakers, as we do this too.
We can call someone pig-headed, or a one-trick pony, we can tell them to hold their horses,
or refer to the elephant in the room.
Italians have even more, and they like to use them, so let’s go through as many as
we can right now, to add some spice to your vocabulary.
Sometimes we can use phrases that simply compare someone to an animal.
We do this in English too, like if we were to call someone a black sheep.
In these cases, we must simply know what that comparison means.
And lastly, we sometimes use animals not just to assign adjectives to people, but verbs,
or types of behavior.
And that’s pretty much all the ways that Italians compare people to animals.
Now if you hear someone use one of these phrases in reference to you, you’ll know whether
to feel flattered or offended! Let's check comprehension.