There's an obscene yet often used expression in Russian which sounds exactly like this: &quot;Сделать что-то на отъебись&quot; Which means you do/create/complete something just enough so that it worked (often in a very bad, barely sufficient, shoddy way) and not a single bit more. As a result of such &quot;work&quot;, the product can be used for its primary purpose but it leaves a very bad aftertaste and in certain cases can even be dangerous. Is there a similar expression in English? A literal translation would be &quot;To do something [so that you or someone else] fucked off&quot;.
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Imagine you are surviving in the wilderness traveling in a wandering manner. You've found this landscape that is wonderfully abundant in food and basking in a very favorable climate. Therefore, you decide that this is your new residence.  Night is approaching, so you haphazardly piece together a makeshift shelter to make for a more enjoyable living experience while you get your act together.  This shelter is only temporary. After you've become familiar with the land and have gathered finer resources, you will begin creating a proper home complete with securities, amenities, and furnishings.  The word I am looking for is an adjective meaning something similar to "created recklessly for temporary use."      The shelter you were building on your first night was a(n) ________   abode.   The words and phrases "ad-hoc", "off the cuff", "on the run" came to my mind, but none of those are understood to mean what I am trying to communicate (in fact, two of them are not even close). If you think of a word with a meaning that you believe to be similar to what I am searching for, I'd love to hear from you!  Thank you.
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Assume there is original source text:     This restaurant is amazing with "delicious lasagna" and great service.   Make sure you go 6-7pm for the quietest times.   I want to quote "delicious lasagna" but not sure how to handle the outer double quotes.  If I was quoting more than just that quotation (e.g. is amazing with "delicious lasagna" and great service) I'd just do:     "...is amazing with 'delicious lasagna' and great service."   However, when quoting just that quotation, it looks like:     "'delicious lasagna'"   Is this the correct way or is there something better?
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English is not my native language, but when I was studying in the US, I was always trying to find an alternative to      I'm full!   I felt that it was a very improper way to express that I have eaten enough, especially when I was invited for dinner. I remember having difficulties demonstrating my gratitude towards my hosts when using this expression.  Being full feels to me a bit like a car that has been filled with gasoline and gasoline is just used to continue working. That's not what I want to say...   Is there a better word I can use? I haven't found one in the dictionary. There are, of course, long forms:     I have had enough [, thank you].   that I have learned to use, but I wonder if there is a short one. Other Languages have rassasié (French), sazio (Italian) and satt (German). Should I use satiated?    Update: Thank you all for the overwhelming response! After 13 answers, I feel I got a better understanding of the phrase. I'm grateful for @Andrews answer, because he took the cultural aspect into consideration. This was the decisive part that I missed. I can also understand @MT_ Head that saying No thank you, I'm full while smiling isn't offensive at all. Thanks for that.   I conclude that there is not a single wide spread word I can use which doesn't sound stilted or strange (or even has a touch of sexual pleasure).   I now have a repertoire of polite responses available. I'm accepting the most helpful answer for me, but most of you got my up-vote. :)
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I want to try word this a bit more elegantly, fancy, etc.  Basically that is a reply to a co-worker who said to me in an email saying "Too much work to do!" and I want to reply to that in an intelligent way.  I was thinking about something along the line of "You only have so much as you decided to have." but that doesn't sound right at all.  Any English experts out there can help?
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What one phrase or idiom describes situations (see examples below), in which people funnel their efforts in the wrong direction?       A boy wants to have a cup of coffee, so he buys a notebook in a stationery store and starts writing 100 times on each page "A cup of coffee", hoping that he is going to get a cup of coffee in this way. However, he never bothers to go to the kitchen and see if he can simply prepare coffee for himself in the kitchen...        A band is going to have a concert tomorrow, but they are not ready yet – they still need to rehearse more. So, instead of rehearsing they simply try to re-arrange the chairs on which they are sitting, hoping that the proper arrangement of chairs will ensure their perfect performance on the next day.        A girl wants to learn how to swim. So she reads tons of books about swimming – how to build  swimming pools, biographies of famous swimmers – yet she never even tries swimming by herself...
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Let's say a friend of mine tells me the following:     Nice! Let’s meet up for a drink this week.   And I want to say, "Sure let's do it. I will propose a few ..., and you tell me if either of them works for you."  I cannot come up with an idiom or other expression that works.
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How to translate the standard mathematical mantra &quot;By an abuse of terminology, …&quot; into German? E.g.  An environment is a family of partial maps $\eta_M\colon X_M\dashrightarrow\dots$ for $M\in S$ such that … By an abuse of terminology, if the sets $X_M$ for $M\in S$ are pairwise disjoint, an environment is a partial map $\eta\colon\bigcup_{M\in S}X_M\dashrightarrow\dots$ such that …  I'm sure German has a standard phrase for that, but it simply won't occur to me now!
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Today, the New York Times online edition  The review contains the following sentence:     The filmmakers don’t villainize anyone, though a few participants come awfully close to twirling waxed mustaches, like an American manager who jokes to a Chinese colleague that it would be a good idea to duct-tape the mouths of talky American workers.   It's clearly nothing positive, but I have never heard of it, cannot deduce the exact meaning from context and could not find anything online, partly because most hits concern physical mustaches.
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For example, when you are a little hungry and you say "I'm starving", or when you are so tired and you say "I'm dying". What do you call these type of expressions? Just exaggerations? I don't know how to explain this better.
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Of late, I have been noticing a lot of casual memes floating around, particularly on Facebook, that involve this phrase. Typical constructs could be like the following examples:     B*&amp;^%$# be like...I need a break.      Niner fans be like...but we won five times!      Liberals be like...I hate guns.   I understand these are strictly informal constructs. But I'd need a native speaker's (American English because most such memes seem to originate in the US) take on:   how casual these phrases are, i.e. if they can be used in semi-formal fiction writing? how this usage originate and if it has any affiliation to a particular dialect group, e.g. Midwest, African-American, Southern American, etc.
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My friend wants to get a tattoo in English. He's very specific about what he wants it to express, but for both of us English is a foreign language and we're not quite sure how to say that using a short but aesthetic phrase. The closest I can get as far as the meaning is concerned is this:     Live for the moments that make life worth living   but that's too long and I guess not very elegant. Is there a good succinct way to express something like that in English?
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There is following idiom in Russian "to write into the drawer" which is being used to describe situation when writer or scientist writes (sometimes prolifically) without publishing anything. Are there direct equivalent or some other idiom/expression which conveys the same idea in English?
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I have in mind a particular kind of expression which employs a repeated sentence structure, but with key words reversed for dramatic or emphatic effect. Here are two examples:   "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog" JFK's famous "ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country"   In both cases, the words in bold have been reversed to reveal a deeper or more profound truth. Does this particular kind of idiom or expression have a formal name?
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What does this phrase mean? And in what cases is it appropriate to use it?
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How do you say to someone that you will reuse a sentence (or a joke) you've just heard from them, as-is, because you liked it a lot ?   In Italian we say "Questa me la rivendo", that translated is "I'm gonna resell that one" (ri-vendo / re-sell is the idiomatic part, the other words could be recombined / replaced).  I can't find anything in the web, so... what is the English version ?
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I heard this lyric in a song the other day and it just sounded so wrong that I assumed it must be incorrect grammar, but I can't find any specific prohibition that applies.     That's what it's.    That rolls off your tongue with the grace of a moose in a tutu, but I can't figure out why.  There is clearly no problem with ending other sentences with a contraction. These sound fine.     I thought I could, but I can't.   Stop touching that, it will fall off if you don't.   You say that the sky is green, but it isn't.   Also, it sounds just fine if you remove the contraction:     That's what it is.   So what's up with this construction? Should it be avoided?
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What are common phrases that describe something that appears good but is actually bad?  Edit: Because people say bad is vague I will try to sum up the phrase meaning a little better.   something that looks like it will be helpful or advantageous but after use it is hindering a tool that seems useful but is not the correct tool for the job something that seems like a good idea but after execution turns out to be problematic