Cobras Fumantes

Lots of languages have briliant ways of saying "never". We have "when pigs fly". Other European languages, stretching a point, are more likely to have "when a cow flies". Latvian has "when the owl's tail blossoms", Turkish has "when fish climb poplar trees", and  Portuguese, charmingly, has "on the afternoon of St Never's Day".
    In Brazil, they used to say "when snakes smoke". "When will Brazil join the war?", President Getúlio Vargas was often asked during World War II. "When snakes smoke!" he would reply. But eventually, Brazil did send a contingent to assist in the Allied invasion of Italy, and it adopted the nickname Cobras Fumantes.
And so, it is for this succession of entirely unremarkable reasons that the emblem of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force is a snake enjoying a puff on a pipe.

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