Dorer la pilule
Meaning: To make an unpleasant fact easier to accept by dressing it up.
Language: French
Literally: To gild the pill
Category: Daily Life
Origin: Apothecaries coated bitter pills in sugar or gold leaf so patients would swallow them. The medicine was unchanged, which is precisely the accusation the phrase carries.
More idioms — Daily Life
- Qui dort dîne — Sleep takes the place of a meal you cannot afford.
- Se la couler douce — To take life very easy indeed.
- Des mesures draconiennes — Punishingly severe rules.
- Péter une durite — To lose one's temper completely.
- À l'eau de rose — Insipidly sentimental, especially of fiction.
- L'échapper belle — To have a narrow escape.
More French idioms
- Faire l'école buissonnière — To play truant.
- Ne pas tarir d'éloges — To praise someone endlessly.
- Qui trop embrasse mal étreint — Attempting too many things at once means doing none of them properly.
- Une éminence grise — The unofficial power behind a public figure.
- À l'emporte-pièce — Trenchant and uncompromising, of a remark or judgment.
- Un enfant de la balle — Someone raised in the trade they now practice.
From our proverbs
- The best horse needs breaking, and the best child needs teaching. — Even the most naturally gifted require discipline and guidance to develop their potential…
- That which is bred in the bone will never be out of the flesh. — Deeply ingrained traits and habits, formed in childhood or by nature, persist throughout…
- Brevity is the soul of wit. — Sharp minds compress meaning into few words; excess dulls the blade of cleverness.
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