4 KudoZ points awarded for this answer. Comment: "This was hard to grade, because all I really wanted to know (see my original post) was whether the phrase was literal or figurative. Once you know it's figurative, there are lots of ways to express it, which I can come up with myself, and many good suggestions have been given here. But I like my own just as well ("an idea popped into his head"), and actually ended up using that. :) But of all the translations suggested, I (and many others) liked this the best. (I like Kari's variation especially.) In grading, it's also unclear to me how much weight to give to the order in which the proposals come in. Since the idea of a 24-hour pause before grading is to "give the guys in the far-away time zones a turn to weigh in," then chronology is not that relevant. But if the first guy basically nails it and everyone builds on that, then he deserves the gold star. Obviously if someone really helps you a lot, either by figuring out something that no one else does, providing useful background, examples, a grammatical assist, or whatnot, then it doesn't matter whether they answered first or last. Anyhow, thanks to everybody."