he who said the rhyme did the crime
- idiom
- Informal
:
el que dijo la rima hizo el crimen
- Kids chanted, "he who said the rhyme did the crime," after someone made a suspicious accusation on the playground.
Examples
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Whenever something was broken in class, the teacher would say, "he who said the rhyme did the crime."
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In the family, repeating he who said the rhyme did the crime was a way to tease the sibling most eager to blame others.
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Don't trust him; he who said the rhyme did the crime!
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He who said the rhyme did the crime is guilty!
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On the playground, the children chanted, "he who said the rhyme did the crime," whenever someone accused another of wrongdoing.
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During the game, when one player pointed fingers, the other quickly responded, "he who said the rhyme did the crime!"
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In the class, whenever a student blamed someone else, the teacher would remind them, "he who said the rhyme did the crime."
Synonyms
A joking way to say the person who first noticed a bad smell caused it
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
he + who + said + the + rhyme + dae + the + crime
The sentence is a straightforward relative-clause construction: 'he who said the rhyme' = 'the person who uttered the rhyme' and 'did the crime' = 'committed the crime', so the overall meaning is directly compositional from the parts. This syntactic and semantic pattern is common cross-linguistically, so a B1 learner who knows the constituent words would be able to infer the intended meaning.
Etymology
The saying he who said the rhyme did the crime comes from children's teasing on playgrounds, where kids would chant that whoever said the rhyme was the one who did the crime. So the line is used to say the person who speaks first is the guilty one, or 'to blame'.