Appeler un chat un chat
Meaning: To call things by their proper name; to speak bluntly.
Language: French
Literally: To call a cat a cat
Category: Animals
Origin: Boileau made it famous in his first Satire of 1666 — j'appelle un chat un chat, et Rolet un fripon (I call a cat a cat, and Rolet a crook), Rolet being an actual, notoriously dishonest prosecutor of the day — but he was not the one who invented it. Erasmus has the same figure in Latin in 1530, ficus ficus, ligonem ligonem vocat (calling a fig a fig, a spade a spade), itself drawn from a Greek proverb Lucian records in the 1st century. Pierre Richelet's 1694 dictionary defines the sense plainly: to call things by their real name, with no dressing-up. A theory crediting the phrase with an old obscene double meaning does not hold up chronologically — Alfred Delvau's 1864 dictionary of slang only records that sense two centuries after Boileau.
Equivalents in other languages
- Spanish: No tener pelos en la lengua — literally: To have no hairs on the tongue
- Norwegian: Å snakke rett fra leveren — literally: To speak straight from the liver
- Italian: Non avere peli sulla lingua — literally: To have no hairs on your tongue
- English: call a spade a spade
More idioms — Animals
- Donner sa langue au chat — To give up trying to guess the answer.
- Faire d'une mouche un éléphant — To make a mountain out of a molehill; to exaggerate wildly.
- faire la morte — Pretending not to notice something or ignoring a situation.
- montrer les dents — Displaying aggression, defiance, or readiness to fight.
- être un ours — Being unfriendly, grumpy, and difficult to approach socially.
- avoir une mémoire d'éléphant — Having exceptional ability to remember details over time.
More French idioms
- Avoir un poil dans la main — To be extremely lazy.
- Prendre ses jambes à son cou — To run away very fast.
- C'est la croix et la bannière — It is an enormous effort or ordeal.
- Faire la fine bouche — To be overly picky or hard to please.
- Se lever du pied gauche — To wake up in a bad mood.
- Avoir le vent en poupe — To be doing very well; everything is going your way.
From our compliments & insults
- Joli comme un cœur — Utterly charming or adorable.
- Tu as un cœur d'or — You are genuinely kind and generous.
- Tu déchires — You're awesome — you totally rock.