No Difference, Really

OK. I didn't quite mean what I now realize I said.

Same meat - different gravy.

"gehupft wie gesprungen" in Bavarian German. Both "gehupft" and "gesprungen" mean "to jump".

Dutch - lood om oud ijzer (lead or scrap iron). Meaning both alternatives are rubbish.

Our country doesn't elect their mayors yet, but our city got a 'mayor's referendum' as an experiment, giving us the choice between 2 guys noone ever heard of, both 50 year old white males from the Labour Party. They didn't each put up their own posters - the city made posters with 2 pictures on one poster.
Within a day, people had written 'lead' under one picture and 'scrap iron' under the other...

I hadn't thought of that, but yes, that's another possibility for Dutch. Both eti's expression and mine above, are sort of used in the way of "six of one, half a dozen of the other," but as so often with translation, the nuances are different.

'Se non è zuppa, è pan bagnato' in Italian (literally, it's either soup or soaked bread).

The election story is where English would most likely use "Tweedledum" and "Tweedledee".

That's funny, I only know Tweedledum and Tweedledee as two funny guys in Through the Looking Glass.. didn't really know it was an expression (but it doesn't surprise me).

English would most likely use "Tweedledum" and "Tweedledee

Referring of course, to the actual candidates.

:-)

Most of the episodes ithe Alice books are based on things that Alice would have known in real life. Tweedledum and Tweedledee is a nursery rhyme. The rhyme doesn't say they looked identical, but I believe they were always pictured so.

In the 1720s there was a rivalry between George Frederick Händel and Giovanni Battista Bonnoncini. The poet John Broom wrote:

Some say, compared to Bonnoncini
That Mynheer Handel's but a ninny.
Others aver that he to Handel
Is scarcely fit to hold a candle;
Strange all this difference should be
'Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.

But that may precede the rhyme. I notice that they're not capitalized there. I think he meant tweedle-dum and dee as imitative of the music, not as names, saying that both composers sounded the same to him, and not very good. We might say twixt tralala and tralalee or something. "Tweedle" is pretty common for the noise a fiddle makes. The idea of tweedledum and tweedledee as too things that are much of a muchness may have come from that, with the rhyme arising out of that idea.

My source is William and Cecil Baring-Gould's Annotated Mother Goose. Theirs is Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice. (But the previous paragraph is me.)