Englishbull in a china shop
Meaning: Insensitive to delicate situations; to be so clumsy that one breaks things inadvertently.
Example: “He went through the delicate negotiations like a bull in a china shop.”
Origin: First recorded in Frederick Marryat's 1834 novel Jacob Faithful — "he trod as if he had been a bull in a china shop" — though it reads like an idiom that had already been in the air for a while before Marryat happened to write it down. No actual china merchant is on record ever having had the misfortune of a real bull wandering in; the phrase works on the strength of the image alone, an animal built for neither delicacy nor caution set loose among the most breakable objects a shop could stock.
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