Coûter la peau des fesses / Coûter les yeux de la tête
Meaning: To cost an absolute fortune.
Language: French
Literally: To cost the skin off one's backside / the eyes out of one's head
Category: Body & Senses
Origin: The series is unsettled, but one thing is certain: in the 19th century Alphonse Allais used simply coûter la peau, so at that point it was all of the skin that mattered, not the skin of any particular part. The fesses version is first attested only in 1976, in the Nouvel Observateur, though it was surely spoken earlier, and the cruder variants came after it. There is an oddity worth noticing: one of them uses the same anatomy as peau de balle, which means precisely nothing at all — the opposite. The eyes are a separate and older strand, found in Balzac among others in the 19th century, and the phrasing is strange in itself, since coûter les yeux would have done; the de la tête looks like reinforcement borrowed from expressions such as arracher les yeux de la tête. One story circulating online should be ignored: it has nothing to do with Ephesus and its bird whistles. The supposed appeau d'Éphèse is a pun and the appeau d'Écouilles behind the coarser variant is pure invention.
Other ways to say this
- Spanish: Costar un ojo de la cara — literally: To cost an eye from the face
- Finnish: Maksaa maltaita — literally: To cost malts
- English: To cost an arm and a leg — literally: To cost an arm and a leg
- French: Coûter un bras — literally: To cost an arm
More idioms — Body & Senses
- 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.
- Se regarder le nombril — To be self-centered or narcissistic.
- Tomaten auf den Augen haben — To be oblivious to what's right in front of you.
More French idioms
- 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…
- Patin couffin — And so on and so forth; et cetera.
- Ça ne casse pas trois pattes à un canard — It's nothing special or impressive.
- C'est comme pisser dans un violon — A completely pointless effort.
- Avoir le cafard — To feel depressed or down.
From our tongue twisters
- Didon dîna, dit-on, du dos d'un dodu dindon dont le dodu dos dodine. — A 'd' / 'din' / 'dod' avalanche that seems designed to jam the tongue in third gear.
- Un chasseur sachant chasser doit savoir chasser sans son chien. — The classic French 'ch' / 's' tangler.
- Les chaussettes de l'archiduchesse sont-elles sèches, archi-sèches? — A merciless duel between 'ch' and 's'.
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