“Not give a hoot”in other languages

Same idea, different pictures

Many languages name something worthless and say it matters less than that: a hoot in English, a cucumber in Spanish, importar un pepino, a sausage in German, das ist mir Wurst. A popular explanation for the German is that a sausage has two identical ends, so either way is the same.

French has an unusual number of these. N'en avoir cure is the polite one, from Latin cura, care. S'en moquer comme de l'an quarante, to care as much as about the year forty, is old and nobody agrees why forty. Others are cheerfully crude, like ça m'en touche une sans faire bouger l'autre.

Italian makes itself a mustache out of it, farsene un baffo, which makes no more sense in Italian than in English.