Enfiler des perles
Meaning: To waste time on pointless busywork.
Language: French
Literally: To thread pearls
Category: Daily Life
Origin: Long before Barbie, Lego and video games, threading beads into necklaces and bracelets was a thoroughly popular way to pass an afternoon. Seen from where the men were standing it was unproductive and trivial, fit for keeping children occupied and for the women who also spent hours at it — and that judgment, not the activity, is what the figurative sense preserves. It turns up in Rabelais in the 16th century, in Gargantua, already with a note of contempt, and the usual modern form is a rebuke: nous ne sommes pas ici pour enfiler des perles, we are not here to thread beads. It gets used of praying too, of fingers running along a rosary, and more recently of someone who will not stop saying stupid things — that last by way of perle in its other sense, a howler.
More idioms — Daily Life
- Tailler une pipe — To perform fellatio. Vulgar.
- Être à côté de la plaque — To be wide of the mark; to answer something other than the question asked.
- Ça va durer trois plombes — It's going to take hours.
- Avoir la poisse — To have persistent, clinging bad luck.
- Avoir un coup de pompe — To be hit by a sudden wave of exhaustion.
- Ça se bouscule au portillon — There's a crush; also, crudely, of an urgent need to be sick.
More French idioms
- Avoir un pet de travers — To be slightly unwell, or simply in a foul mood.
- Pédé comme un phoque — Said of a man: unmistakably gay. *Pédé* is a homophobic slur and the phrase is offensive.
- Pisser dans sa culotte / Pisser dans son froc — To laugh helplessly — or, oppositely, to be terrified.
- Se chatouiller le poireau / S'astiquer la colonne — To masturbate, said of a man. Vulgar.
- Tirer le portrait — To take someone's photograph.
- Manger sur le pouce — To eat in a hurry, standing up.
From our tongue twisters
- Seize chaises sèches sur seize arches sèches. — A relentless collision of 'sei', 'sèch', and 's' — the tongue can't find traction.
- Un beau ver vert dans un verre vert verra un ver vert. — Ver (worm), vert (green), and verre (glass) are near-homophones — distinguishing them at…
- 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.
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