What does "cue the tumbleweed" mean? (Why one should avoid cultural references?)

I’m a member of the yahoo mailing list since the very beginning. In the last five years (maybe more) it has been nearly dead. Maybe not for being a yahoo group but from being a mailing list and people like forums. This forum has more activity in a day then the mailing list in a year.

Sorry, non-native English speaker here: what does “cue the tumbleweeds” mean?

It is a common image in American Western films to have abandoned towns in a dry/desert area with tumbleweeds rolling down the street

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Crickets. :grin:

Tumbleweeds are something that you always saw in old westerns when they showed a ‘ghost town’. Dried brush that tumbles along with the wind. Nobody around to clean them up.

Thanks @craftyjon, @hermit
I have a dictionary to look up what a tumbleweed is :wink:

What I couldn’t find was the expression “cue the tumbleweeds”.

Thanks for teaching new expressions in English, not only KiCad.

Turnabout is fair play:
In your native culture, is there a common visual or graphic metaphor that symbolizes abandonment, emptiness, desolation, etc?

Dale

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Here we go (literal translation)
Está hecho un solar = It has become a bare soil
Está hecho un erial = It has become a wasteland
Más solo que la una = more lonely than one o’clock

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I like the turn of this phrase. But I’m not sure I fully understand the connotation. Is this one o’clock at night or in the afternoon? If it is the afternoon is the association because just about everyone is taking their siesta?

One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do? :wink:

Sorry, the cultured folks on this Forum have not had their minds corrupted by American rock-and-roll music.

I also like this one. It uses imagery similar to the U.S. English idiom “Like a graveyard at midnight”, but that English phrase implies a place that is spooky, scary, or haunted - not just devoid of other living people.

Dale

Sorry for going on the off topic

The sentence has become corrupted by people in some way. Originally was not referred to “one” as the most solitary number around the day, but from a XIX century politician called “Laúna” (this word has no particular meaning) who run for the elections without the support of any political party.

Similar to Key West in English, translated by someone from Cayo Hueso (Key Bone) Hueso->Ues->West

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Manually moved from the original topic: (I wrote and posted just as the thread was split.)

Oh, so “la una” came from “Laúna”. Got it. I found this article interesting:


(Oh, that was confusing. I read it in English, but then I see the forum snapshot of the site is in Spanish. Seems Chrome auto-translated the web page for me.)
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giphy-2

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Oh, this was a delightful conversation to follow! Being from the US east-coast, but having lived in Phoenix for 4 years, this was still a new phrase for me. Thank you all!

They should. We can change that. :smiley:

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Ok. I’m an American, but I don’t think I would ever have used that phrase

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And I am a European who obviously must have spent FAR too long as a youngster watching Hollywood ‘Wild West’ films …

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I too enjoyed reading this topic! Very fun comparing cultural references.

Two can be as bad as one.

Hi everyone. Thanks for the information :slightly_smiling_face: