FrenchÇa se bouscule au portillon
Meaning: There's a crush; also, crudely, of an urgent need to be sick.
Literally: There's a scramble at the little gate
Example: “Pour les places gratuites du concert, ça se bouscule au portillon.” — For the free concert tickets, people are pushing and shoving to get in.
Origin: Pure Paris métro, from the era when the ticket-puncher still had a job. Access to the platform ran through a gate that he closed as a train pulled in, so anyone still in the corridor who heard it coming broke into a run rather than lose the minutes until the next one — hence the scrimmage at the gate at rush hour. Behind the closed gate, meanwhile, a crowd built up stamping with impatience, and poured onto the platform when it opened again. That is the whole image, and it transfers to any dense impatient crowd: a queue at a stadium, an unexpected field of election candidates, traffic on a road, words coming out too fast to be finished, thoughts arriving quicker than they can be sorted. The second sense is much more recent and extends the same picture — an unexpected volume of material that has to get out through one opening, urgently — usually after a heavy night.
More French idioms
- Manger sur le pouce To eat in a hurry, standing up.
- Cucul la praline Twee; soppy; embarrassingly naive.
- Pour des prunes For nothing; in vain.
- Fait comme un rat Trapped, with no way out.
- Se magner la rondelle To get a move on. Vulgar.
- Avoir les deux pieds dans le même sabot To be incapable of acting; to sit there doing nothing.
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- Un chasseur sachant chasser doit savoir chasser sans son chien. The classic French 'ch' / 's' tangler.
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- Si six scies scient six cyprès, six cents scies scient six cents cyprès. An 's' / 'si' minefield.
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