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Comment by hughrr | Hacker News Reader

Yes watercraft have another saying: the best days of owning a boat are the day you get it and the day the insurance pays out after it sinks

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Another Dutch one I know :

Koop een boot, werk je dood.

translates loosely to :

Buy a boat and work on it will be a deathmarch.

Except in Duch, it rhymes.

Could you also translate that "Buy a boat, work yourself dead" ?

Or "to death", yes. Same sentence structure works fine barring the occasional word order change in most Germanic languages (e.g. Kjøp en båt, arbeid deg til døde/til døds" in Norwegian. I can't find a way of making it rhyme in other Germanic languages, though.

(incidentally work/werk have cognates in German and Scandinavian languages too, but only as nouns (Werk, virke, verk etc.), hence the shift to "arbeid" in the Norwegian version; and "buy"->kjøp or e.g. German kaufen is extra odd, with English having retained a Germanic form while the others inherited a latin loan-word; yes I know this is a total digression...)

Mine is, "sailboats are for people with sufficient financial savvy not to own horses."

Horses are terrible. My sister is an equine speciality vet so is taking advantage of that fact.

Two unrelated friends said the same thing after owning yachts for a long time.

> Best yacht is your friend's yacht.

One was racing and had many 1st place finishes too. Both sold out all floating assets.

Less novel but also true: you don’t own a boat, a boat owns you.

Also applies to cats!

Cats and boats, I have no desire to own either. Sorry, be enslaved to either.

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