This phraseological unit exists not only in Russian, but also in some other languages, for example, in German, French, Polish, English. What is meant when a person is said to have to make ends meet? The interpretation of the idiom is approximately the same for all nations, although it has several meanings that are quite close in meaning.
How should the phrase "make ends meet" be understood?
Often phraseologism is used in cases when people are talking about people who have difficulty in work, performing professional or domestic tasks, unsuccessfully trying to find the right solution. For example: “It was not easy, it took some time to make ends meet.”
Even more often, a similar speech formulation can be heard in relation to a person who is limited in financial resources, who is forced to count every penny in order to meet the allocated budget. They say about him like this: "He earns so little that he barely makes ends meet." In this situation, the phrase "reducemake ends meet" meaning takes on an almost literal meaning, according to the originally intended meaning: "keep expenses on arrival", that is, try to spend exactly as much as you get.
Etymology of a stable expression
Presumably, this turnover came to Russian from French, where joindre les deux bouts means "to connect the two ends." Linguists believe that the idiom was born in the accounting environment and was used in the meaning of "to reduce the debit to the credit." Performing this action was no easy task. Therefore, the phrase "make ends meet" began to sound in a figurative sense, when talking about tangled circumstances, the way out of which required the application of mental or physical effort.
Other versions of the origin of the idiom
In literary sources, the expression has been found for a long time. For example, the English historian Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) describes the life of a certain gentleman as follows: “Worldly we alth did not appeal to him, he preferred to be content with little, if only to make ends meet.”
Although there is clearly a financial bias here, some linguists believe that the expression could have appeared in a craft environment where it was required to combine individual parts into one whole. The tailor had to accurately calculate the amount of fabric for tailoring. And for a person engaged in the manufacture of baskets and other similar utensils, bring together the ends of the vine or birch bark strips. In the affirmative sound, this phraseological unit has a positive meaning. Hemeans that a person managed to cope with difficult work, got out of a difficult financial or everyday situation.
