What's a fun idiom that you've learned recently?

[rdearman]

Reminds me of this.

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[vonPeterhof]

But then, for all I know it may be that the expression actually predates the joke, or indeed that the joke long predates the Soviet era.

Found an article that says that similar stories have been attested in Persia as early as the 12th century, with the earliest known versions having donkeys instead of camels or elephants. The torture methods also vary a lot, but the specific variant I remember with the skinning doesn't seem to appear anywhere (in fact, now that I remember it, I might have first heard this specific variant in an English translation instead of Russian).