COLLINS ONLINE DICTIONARIES
I am the type of person who "reads" dictionaries. I check up on a word or expression and, before I know it, one thing leads to another, and two hours have passed! Today I was checking the word "bill" in the online version of Collins Dictionary. I came across the cute expression "sell a bill of goods", to deceive, swindle, or take unfair advantage of someone, which gives the Spanish equivalent of "dar a alguien gato por liebre." Curious as I am, I went straight to "gato" only to find that now "dar a alguien gato por liebre" was not "to sell someone a bill of goods", but "to con someone" or "to have been done." Students of English will never get to the phrase "sell a bill of goods" in Spanish. I am not daunted by the idiosyncrasies of workbooks, so I tried another idiom: "Dársela a alguien con queso" which is similar in meaning. What did I get? "To take someone in." The...