English proverb

[Elen]

Hello! Will you help me to choose the right word in this proverbs.
1. A miss is as good as a ... / mister,mile, wife/ and why wife not mister?
2. /Blood, coffee, soup/ is thicker than water. How can be explained? why blood? Soup is thicker too.
Thank you very much.

[Vega]

1. miss is as good as a mile

Prov. Almost having done something is the same as not having done it at all, since in both cases the thing does not get done. We only missed the train by one minute? Well, a miss is as good as a mile.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs. © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

2. Blood is thicker than water.

"Blood is thicker than water" is a German proverb (originally: Blut ist dicker als Wasser.), which is also common in English speaking countries. It generally means that the bonds of family and common ancestry are stronger than those bonds between unrelated people (such as friendship).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water

[Elen]

Thank you for the reply. It's clearly about the second proverb.
but the first one is obscurely. Why the word "miss " is compared with "mile", instead " minite" , for example. May be there is another explanation.

[Josef]

The original idea was probably conceived in terms of distance. If you shoot an arrow at a target and miss it by one inch then it would be the same if you missed it by one mile. When you miss something (in the sense of not hit or not achieve), then the degree by which you miss it is not relevant. If you lose a game of football by only one goal, you still lost.