Yea, but I would hardly call it archaic: “to irritate” = to “excite to some characteristic action or condition, such as motion, contraction, or nervous impulse, by the application of a stimulus; ‘irritate the glands of a leaf’”*
. . . possible “to get on someone’s nerves” synomyms:
1. to rub someone the wrong way
2. to rattle someone’s (rib)cage
3. to give someone a hard time
4. to offend someone’s spleen (like in Shakespeare)
5. to make someone chafe
6. to provoke someone’s ire/animus
7. to give someone the creeps*
8. to try someone’s patience
9. to drive someone insane
etc.
*n.b. “heebie-jeebies” perhaps too ethnopolemic here!
8. to be a pain in the neck.
And yes I’d put it in a fairy tale similar to Hans Christian Anderson, just as much as any of bandito’s seven above. thank you.
Must be an interesting fairy tale to have a person in a cage in order to rattle it.
Sorry, but I don’t see that you made yourself very clear in the first place. Are you writing a fairy tale? Above you said you would use the 3rd of bandito’s suggestions, now the 4th one. I was only
trying to help. Sorry if I upset you.
I made a mistake, I wanted to write 4, but typed 3.
I´m translating Slovak folk fairy tales by Dobšinský into English, and it´s extremely difficult because there is a very old-fashioned language, it´s very formal, archaic. No one speaks like that now and I want it to be authentic. Therefore I asked for literary idioms or vocabulary.
I guess I really will thank you a lot, it helps to know that. Just making a suggestion without knowing where it is going is difficult. Please don’t be put off on the site because of my misunderstanding.
I would imagine the translation to be difficult. Is it just a hobby or an academic Pursuit? And always, always ask for help here, sometimes two heads are better than one, even if the other one is mine.
Oh, thank you for your words.
I´m soooory for the misunderstandings.
It is my job and hobby as well. But now I am learning French intensely, so I put aside my English a bit and I can see that it is deteriorating…. I would like to ask so many things, sometimes just to be sure, but I didn´t want to bother. But I think I will ask for help again, because the stories are really difficult. And I have to finish them by the end of the next week.
Feel free, and if you don’t want to be a bother on the public forum, use the PM private message to me or anyone.
If I don’t know, I’ll ask someone as well, and get back to you.
Terrific hobby by the way. I used to teach French, but it is very deteriorated, out of use for too many years.
I don´t want to create a new topic each time I have a little question, so can I ask you here at this place, whether I can say about a person that she is abandoned, when no one cares that she exists, she is not interesting for anybody any more?
And can I say that you throw a dog out on a dump?
Here is the sentence, this is not in a fairy tale, but one person speaks about his feelings when his grandmother used to read him the fairy tale of a dog Bodrik:
I cried so often inconsolably at the moment when Bodrík was thrown out onto a dump and I would look at my grand mother as if it was her who had to leave abandoned into oblivion.
Thanks a lot for help
I think so.
Perhaps just a little “cleaning up” of the sentence:
I cried inconsolably when Bodrik was thrown out, like being tossed onto a dump. And I would look at my grandmother as if it were she who had to leave, abandoned into oblivion.
{Of course I don’t know the context of the work, but this seems OK to me.}
Others may come and clean up my sentence, however, and so much the better.
