the.com/ill wind
The bad luck that somehow always blows good for someone else.
means A misfortune that, while bad for most, happens to bring an advantage to someone else — from the proverb 'it's an ill wind that blows nobody good.'
from From an old English proverb recorded as far back as the 1500s, built on sailors' weather-lore: a wind that's foul for one ship's heading might be fair for another's, so even a wind everyone curses is, for somebody, the wind they needed. The phrase 'ill wind' got lifted out of the full proverb and now stands on its own to mean exactly that pocket of good luck hiding inside someone else's bad luck.
- full idiom
- it is an ill wind that blows nobody good
- origin
- old sailor proverb about foul weather and ports
- modern use
- describes disasters with a hidden, unintended beneficiary
- classic example
- funeral homes thriving during a plague