in the same boat
Meaning: In a shared predicament or situation; facing the same difficulties or circumstances together.
Language: English
Literally: (Already vivid in English)
Category: Daily Life
Origin: The logic is absolute in a way few shared-fate metaphors are: a small boat does not distribute its outcome among the people aboard, it delivers the same one to all of them, and no amount of individual merit or effort separates a good sailor from a bad one when the hull fails. That completeness is why the image has been reached for repeatedly and independently. Cicero used it in Latin in the first century BC, writing to a correspondent that they were in the same boat, and the English phrase is attested from the 1500s. It is worth noting what the idiom quietly insists on: not merely that two people face similar difficulties, but that their fates are mechanically linked and cannot be separated by anything either of them does.
More idioms — Daily Life
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More English idioms
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