before you can say knife

Meaning: Veryquickly; quicker than one expects.Synonym:before you can say Jack Robinson1893,Rudyard Kipling, “Judson and the Empire”, inMany Inventions‎[1]:'Oh, we'll pull you offbefore you can say knife. Take care of His Excellency. I shall try to get a little sleep now.'1926,W. Somerset Maugham, “The Letter”, inMore Far Eastern Tales, Random House, published2010,→ISBN:‘Ginger, Ginger,before you can say knifeshe'll make you into a damned missionary.’ I don't know that I'd mind that so much if we had a little mission of our own.

Examples:

EN: I'll be back and we'll be together again before you can say knife.
ES: Volveré antes que puedas decir cuchillo.
EN: Otherwise, before you can say knife, people are showing you their moles or asking you if smoking really causes cancer.
ES: De otro modo antes de poder decir buenas noches la gente te estará enseñando las muelas o preguntando si es cierto que el fumar provoca cáncer.
EN: You'll be on the seafront with a ninety-nine before you can say knife.
ES: Va a estar frente al mar con todo su esplendor antes de poder decir ni mu.

Note: the examples for non latin scripts have a high likelihood of mistakes, we do not own any of this data and it is sourced from Wiktionary, the NLLB database and Opensubtitles. Please help us improve this by contributing correct examples. We will be working to fix this issue over time however it is a bigger issue due to the the difficulties in dealing with non latin scripts and grammatical structures(non-romantic/european languages have lower resources as well ).