There comes a moment in every human life when another human is standing too close, talking too long, and saying something you did not ask to hear. You feel it rise up in your chest. The urge. The deep, ancient, cross-cultural need to tell this person, with feeling, to go away.
What fascinates us is not the urge itself. Everyone has that. What fascinates us is how creatively different countries decided to dress it up. Because almost nobody just says “go away.” That would be far too efficient. Instead, over a few hundred years, people across Europe quietly agreed on a set of beautifully specific, completely unhinged instructions to give someone they no longer wish to see. And the best part is that each one comes with a backstory that somehow makes it worse.
Allow us to walk you through our favourites.
France: “Va te faire cuire un œuf”
Literally: go cook yourself an egg.
This is the one that started the whole collection for us. The story goes that the kitchen was once considered the wife’s territory, and when a husband wandered in to criticise the cooking, she had the perfect response ready. Go cook your own egg, then. The egg being, of course, the one thing he could theoretically manage on his own without burning the house down. It was a polite, devastating way of saying “you clearly know better, so off you go,” and then enjoying the silence that followed. Centuries later, the French still use it, and it remains the most elegant way ever invented to call someone useless.
Spain: “Vete a freír espárragos”
Literally: go fry asparagus.
The Spanish took the food theme and ran somewhere stranger with it. There is no grand legend here, just a quiet genius. You cannot really get angry at someone for sending you off to fry a vegetable. It is too gentle, too ridiculous, too green. That is the entire point. It lets you dismiss someone with a smile on your face, and by the time they have worked out whether they have been insulted, you are already gone. We respect the strategy enormously.
Portugal: “Vai pentear macacos”
Literally: go comb monkeys.
Here is where things get genuinely committed. The Portuguese do not send you off to do something easy. They send you off to comb monkeys, a task so pointless and so labour intensive that the phrase most likely dates back to a time when grooming animals was seen as the most thankless work imaginable. It is not “leave me alone.” It is “leave me alone, and may the rest of your afternoon be spent on something with absolutely no reward.” That is a level of spite we can only describe as artisanal.
The Netherlands: “Loop naar de maan”
Literally: walk to the moon.
The Dutch keep it short and impossible. Walk to the moon. Not fly, not travel, walk. It is the Dutch equivalent of telling someone to go to hell, except hell is replaced with a roughly 384,000 kilometre stroll that they are expected to begin immediately and on foot. We find the practicality of it very moving. No drama, no shouting, just a calmly suggested journey that physically cannot be completed.
Germany: “Geh dahin, wo der Pfeffer wächst”
Literally: go to where the pepper grows.
And finally, the Germans, who as ever were thinking about logistics. Centuries ago, pepper was imported from somewhere so distant that nobody could quite picture it, a place at the very edge of the known map. So when a German wanted you truly, properly out of sight, they sent you to where the pepper grows. Far away. Unreachable. Vaguely tropical. It is the only insult on this list that doubles as a spice supply chain, and we think that is exactly the kind of detail worth printing on a shirt.
So we made a collection about it
We could not stop thinking about all of this, which is roughly how every good idea around here begins. Five countries, five completely different ways of getting rid of someone, and not a single rude word among them. Just eggs, asparagus, monkeys, the moon, and a long walk to wherever pepper happens to grow.
That is the Get Lost collection. Every piece carries one of these phrases in plain English, with no language tag and no flag to give the game away. Just the words “go cook yourself an egg” or “go comb monkeys,” sitting there with total confidence and zero explanation. Strangers will assume you made it up. Friends will ask what on earth it means. And only then do you get to explain, slowly, with great satisfaction, exactly which country taught you that, and exactly where you would like them to go.
Cultured. Confident. Confused. Just like the rest of us.