What does the expression «wait by the sea for the weather» mean?
"I walk the shore, I watch the weather," - the narrator in Pushkin's ‘Eugene Onegin’ is not checking the forecast for tomorrow. What is he doing then?
This expression "ждать у моря погоды" ("zdat u morya pogody") or "wait by the sea for the weather" denotes that someone is waiting for favorable circumstances and hopes that they will someday come. But, at what point in time it will happen is unknown.
It is believed that originally sailors waited for the weather at sea - their work and lives, too, depended on whether they could go out on their boat to fish or remain on the shore, due to a storm or otherwise bad weather. And in Vladimir Bogomolov's novel ‘The moment of truth’, the hero described the long wait as follows: "We had to wait by the sea for days, or maybe weeks, for weather and not yawn. It's like fishing: you never know at what exact moment it will bite. And, in this case, I doubted: would it bite at all?"
Only over time did this expression begin to be used in a negative sense, emphasizing that a person is not doing anything, as if waiting for some sign “from above”.
