can't polish a turd
- idiom
- Offensive
:
[Vulgar] no se puede arreglar algo que es una mierda
- They spent hours redesigning the product, but you can't polish a turd; the quality is still poor.
Examples
-
It's clear that you can’t polish a turd when the foundation of the project is flawed.
-
You cannot polish a turd.
Blog text (2) -
No matter how much you try, you simply can’t polish a turd and make it look appealing.
Antonyms
How Fixable
Surface Forms
Morphology
The components map directly onto the intended metaphor: 'polish' = make better/shine and 'turd' = a worthless thing, so a learner who knows the words can plausibly infer the message that something fundamentally bad cannot be made good. However, the expression is metaphorical and informal/vulgar rather than a literal compositional action, so the mapping is not purely literal and may require recognizing the idiomatic comparison.
Etymology
The saying can't polish a turd comes from the image of trying to polish a turd, that is, rubbing a piece of animal waste to make it shiny. Because you cannot turn something really bad into something good just by making it look nice, the phrase means 'you cannot make something bad appear good'.