English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
In the Persian/Farsi language there exists a phrase "a bowl which is hotter than the soup", which means:
A person who cares ridiculously about others' business more than his/her own business.
I only know the above expression, a translation from Persian to English which is equal to this but it doesn't work because I want an English expression, term or adjective to express this character.
Could you please help me to create it?
If a single word will suffice, those suggested by J.R. will do very well.
But if you want a longer, proverbial expression, you may pick any verse from Matthew 7:3-5:
1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
This isn’t a phrase to describe them, but I heard this expression growing up: “mind your own beeswax!” I suspect it originated as a funny variant on “mind your own business,” meaning “don’t be so concerned with the business of others.”
More words for busybody, not used as often modernly but people will generally know what you mean: “buttinsky” (they “butt in” to other’s business), “nosy Parker” (not sure of the origin of this, though “nosy” by itself is also an adjective for a person who is curious and inquisitive into things others would prefer keep private), “snoop” (this is a noun or a verb, a prying person and the action of prying into private things), yenta (this is from Yiddish but is used in English sometimes; originally a yenta was a matchmaker, a marriage-arranger, but it came to mean someone who was always involved in the affairs of others); All these courtesy of https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/busybody “he has his nose in everyone’s business.”
“Kibitzer” - a person who doesn’t have a hand of cards to play themselves, but looks over the shoulders of players’s to see their hands and tells them how they ought to play (especially if they look at more than one hand and base their advice on that knowledge). This is sometimes used out of the playing card context for someone who always tells other people how they should do a task or live their life. Kibitz can also be a verb, and the participle kibitzing.
Here is an idiomatic phrase: “back-seat driver.” Similar to kibitzer, it came from literally someone sitting in the back seat of a car who constantly second-guesses the driver’s decisions, tells them they should be doing something else, etc, but quickly became a metaphor for telling others how to run their life.
