seventh water after kissel
- idiom
- Archaic
:
agua de séptima categoría
- The directions he gave were the seventh water after kissel—impossibly convoluted and hard to follow.
Examples
-
This bureaucratic process is the seventh water after kissel; no one can make sense of it anymore.
-
By the time the rumor reached me, it was the seventh water after kissel, barely resembling the original story.
-
The instructions were like seventh water after kissel!
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Why do you always make your explanations sound like seventh water after kissel?
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When he tried to explain the project, it felt like a seventh water after kissel, leaving everyone more confused.
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The complex algorithm was a seventh water after kissel, making it difficult for anyone to grasp its purpose.
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Her explanation was the seventh water after kissel, filled with unnecessary details that obscured the main point.
Synonyms
14
7.3
A messy mixture of different things thrown together
7
6.4
A confused mix of different things
A large confusing mix of facts or details that is hard to understand
Antonyms
How Confusing
- Archaic
31
8.6
276
3.2
207
3.9
99
3.7
Surface Forms
Morphology
seventh + water + after + kissel
This is an idiomatic, culture-specific metaphor (from Slavic languages: 'seventh water after kissel') whose meaning 'extremely diluted or inconsequential' cannot be predicted from the literal constituents. The item even contains an unfamiliar lexical element ('kissel') and an unusual compositional pattern, so a B1 learner who knows the words would not reliably infer the idiomatic sense.
Etymology
Seventh water after kissel comes from a picture of kissel, a thick fruit jelly. If you keep adding water, the seventh water would be almost plain water, so the phrase means something so 'watered down' or 'far from the original' that it becomes confusing and useless.