Que dalle

Literally: Only slab

Example: “J'ai cherché mes clés partout et j'ai trouvé que dalle.” — I looked everywhere for my keys and found diddly-squat.

English equivalent: Diddly-squat

Origin: Usually hung on a verb — ne rien valoir, ne rien comprendre — and interchangeable with que pouic, que tchi, or peau de balle. The dalle looks like the paving slab, and because an old five-franc coin was also called a dalle, from Flemish daalder, that coin has often been offered as the origin. Claude Duneton disposes of it neatly: in 1835 five francs was worth roughly thirty euros, which is not que dalle at all. The word is in fact a deformation of dail, which is how Gaston Esnault records the older form, que le dail. Where dail comes from is where the lexicographers part company. Esnault takes it from the Lorraine dailler, from German dahlen, meaning to joke in the 15th century and later, in eastern dialects, to talk nonsense — leaving the awkward question of how a joke becomes nothing at all. Duneton's answer is better: dail comes from Romani, in which the word simply means nothing.