Thread: To make ends meet...

Hola! Alguien sabe cómo se origina esta frase? Porque la traducción literal no tiene nada que ver con el sentido metafórico de la frase. Saludos!

Encontré esto, que no es de mi autoría, pero seguro te va a servir para calmar un poco tus dudas carmenlm:

Today, the phrase refers to money and being able to stretch your money in order to pay all your bills.

I have found several versions of its origin: you get to choose!

1. The origin is from sailing ships with lots of masts. Some were attached by ropes that moved. Some were hung with ropes that were permanent. When the lower ropes broke, the Captain would tell the men to pull the ropes together, splice them to get the ends to meeet again, pull and tug on the canvas, so that the masts would be productive for sailing again.

2. make ends meet - budget tightly - the metaphor was originally to do with wearing a shorter (tighter) belt presumably because you have been frugal, and are eating less, your belt would more easily fasten.

3. This phrase was first used by Tobias Smollett in the book The Adventures of Roderick Random. The phrase was used as a shorter form for the phrase "Making both ends of the year meet".

[edit] Verbto make ends meet

(idiomatic) to have enough money to cover expenses; to get by financially; to get through the pay period (sufficient to meet the next payday).
2009, ‘Avarice and Audacity’, The Guardian, 27 Feb 09:
Barclays, which until now has made ends meet with costly loans from the Middle East rather than take public money, may soon join the queue for the emergency medicine too.
2007, Peter Geoffrey Hall, London Voices, London Lives, p. 269:
Very many Londoners reported to us that they were struggling to make ends meet; that it was a constant battle to keep their heads above water, or that they had only just got into the position of being able to breathe freely.
1996, Chris Peters, Sudan: A Nation in the Balance, p. 42:
Although most of the poor and displaced in Khartoum struggle to make ends meet, a very small number not only find work, but form small co-operatives.

4. From Robert Priddy, Norway: Is the origin of the expression to make ends meet known?

[A] Not really. It’s old enough that it has centuries ago become an idiom, a turn of phrase that we don’t usually stop to think about at all, though we understand immediately that to make ends meet is to have enough money to live on. The oldest example I can find is from Thomas Fuller’s The History of the Worthies of England of about 1661: “Worldly wealth he cared not for, desiring only to make both ends meet; and as for that little that lapped over he gave it to pious uses”, but the fact that Fuller is making a little joke using it suggests he already knew of it as a set phrase.

Where it comes from is hard to be sure about. It’s often said that it’s from bookkeeping, in which the total at the bottom (“end”) of the column of income must at least match that at the bottom of the expenditure column if one is not to be living beyond one’s income (think of Mr Micawber’s advice to the young David Copperfield). The phrase is also known in the form to make both ends of the year meet, which might strengthen that connection if we think of the usual end-of-year accounting, except that that form isn’t the original one and wasn’t recorded until Tobias Smollett used it in Roderick Random in 1748.

Several subscribers have told me that their understanding of the phrase was that it came from tailoring or dressmaking, in which the amount of cloth available might only just be sufficient to allow the garment to wrap completely around the body and so make the ends meet. Thomas Fuller implies something of the sort in the quotation above. A subscriber whom I know only as Ludwik says there is a similar saying in Polish, zwiazac koniec z koncem (“to tie up one end with the other”); it evokes the image of a belt or similar item that likewise one had to hope would be long enough for its purpose. It suggests the phrase may contain a similar idea to another idiom, to have enough to go round, which comes from the hope that one has enough food for everyone at table. It might be that language writers have taken the associations of the phrase with money too literally in arguing that it’s connected with bookkeeping.

Fuente: What is the origin of the phrase"Make ends meet? what ends are we talking about? - Yahoo! Answers

and I always thought it was referring to being able to afford a little meat to eat!! You learn something new every day!

Gracias por tan exhaustiva investigación Federicop. De todas las versiones me gustó la metafora de que al no tener plata, comés menos entonces el cinturon cierra más facil. 2. make ends meet - budget tightly - the metaphor was originally to do with wearing a shorter (tighter) belt presumably because you have been frugal, and are eating less, your belt would more easily fasten. Saludos!

A mi me gusta más la última, te deja pensando un poco.

Estoy de acuerdo con Fede.