It's all Greek to me
idiom

- a way of saying that you do not understand something that is said or written

Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary

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ORIGIN

Despite the numerous words of Greek origin that can be found in English, we still insist on associating Greek with things that are difficult to understand.

Some claim that Shakespeare was the first to use this expression in Julius Caesar: "Those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but for mine own part, it was Greek to me."

It would then be easy to blame the English for coming up with this idiom. The truth is, it stems from the Latin proverb, "Graecum est; non potest legi," which literally means "It is Greek. It cannot be read." We merely translated it to English.

To be fair, other languages can be just as difficult. Mark Twain wrote an essay titled "The Awful German Language" in which he complains about the difficulty of finding the verb in a sentence, only to realise that it always comes at the end.

But don't be surprised if English is sometimes Greek to you too, when you hear things like...

We ship by truck and send cargo by ship, we fill in forms by filling them out, and that our alarms go off by going on.

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Practice OWAD in an English conversation, say something like:

"The small print in this contract IS ALL GREEK TO ME."

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Paul Smith