Doitsujin wrote:tommus wrote:"Pas deze week liep de Duitser tegen de lamp bij een controle."
My Dutch has become extremely rusty, but I believe that "tegen de lamp lopen" is an idiom and simply means getting caught.
Thanks. That is what I understood. A direct translation could have been that he got caught in an audit. But a more idiomatic way of saying that in English would be something like "he ran up against an audit". So I was wondering if, idiomatically, the Dutch see it as also running up against something, and is that something a "lamp pole" (i.e., maybe while walking or driving a car), as opposed to simply a "lamp". By more fully understanding such idioms, an L2 learner can more easily remember the expression.