À l'œil
Meaning: Free of charge.
Language: French
Literally: At the eye
Category: Body & Senses
Origin: In the first half of the 19th century this mostly meant on credit, not free. Gaston Esnault's reading is the simple one: a merchant extending credit to someone he does not really know is judging by appearance — by eye. From there, debtors being what they are, credit slid easily into free. Claude Duneton points out that the two senses ran side by side for a long time, citing Delvau in 1867, and traces the free sense to appearance as well: the shopkeeper who gives a small thing away to a pretty young customer, a habit attested in the 17th century and surely older. For the credit sense he goes further, though without texts to prove it, to a practice Furetière records — merchants tallied debts as knife-notches on a wooden stick, and the poor took bread à la coche, on the notch, until they could pay. A row of V-shaped nicks looks a good deal like a row of eyes. As literacy spread the stick gave way to a slate, which is where avoir une ardoise chez quelqu'un comes from. Two dead phrases preserve the credit sense: ouvrir un œil à quelqu'un, to extend credit, and crever l'œil à quelqu'un, to refuse it.
More idioms — Body & Senses
- L'avoir dans l'os — To come off badly; to be had.
- Coûter la peau des fesses / Coûter les yeux de la tête — To cost an absolute fortune.
- Rouler un patin / Rouler une galoche — To kiss deeply, with tongue.
- Tomber dans les pommes — Suddenly losing consciousness — possibly derived from the older expression 'être dans les…
- Avoir la moutarde qui monte au nez — To be getting angry.
- Couper les cheveux en quatre — To over-analyze or split hairs.
More French idioms
- Être à l'ouest — To be out of it; not with it at all.
- Avoir des oursins dans la poche / Avoir des oursins dans le porte-monnaie — To be tight-fisted.
- Sur la paille — Reduced to real poverty.
- Avoir un nom à coucher dehors — To have a name nobody can pronounce or remember.
- Être dans les petits papiers de quelqu'un — To be in someone's good books; to enjoy their favor.
- Faire un pataquès — To make a clumsy verbal slip, or a blunder generally; also, to make an enormous fuss over…
From our untranslatable words
- L'esprit de l'escalier — Thinking of the perfect comeback only after the moment has passed — on your way down the…
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- Râler — To complain and grumble with a certain national flair — a beloved French pastime.
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