Donner sa langue au chat
Meaning: To give up trying to guess the answer.
Language: French
Literally: To give one's tongue to the cat
Category: Animals
Origin: Older still than the cat: Madame de Sévigné has jeter sa langue aux chiens — to throw one's tongue to the dogs, dogs being what you gave your leftovers to, so surrendering your tongue to them meant giving up an organ of speech that had stopped earning its keep, since you were never going to say the answer you'd given up guessing. George Sand's generation instead confided a secret dans l'oreille du chat — into the cat's ear — on the reasoning that a cat, unable to talk, could be trusted with anything (barring, of course, Puss in Boots). The dog and the cat merged into the modern verb only in 1860, with Edmond de Goncourt's Charles Demailly an early instance of donner sa langue au chat in print.
More idioms — Animals
- 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.
- avoir une langue de vipère — Speaking maliciously, spreading rumors, or being verbally cruel.
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.