Se croire le premier moutardier du pape
Meaning: To have a wildly inflated sense of one's own importance.
Language: French
Literally: To think oneself the pope's chief mustard-maker
Category: The Absurd
Origin: The post was real: the Avignon popes, and John XXII in particular, kept a mustard-maker on the household staff. The joke is that it is simultaneously a papal appointment and a job making mustard.
More idioms — The Absurd
- Mystère et boule de gomme — Nobody has the faintest idea.
- Promettre monts et merveilles — To promise far more than could ever be delivered.
- De la poudre de perlimpinpin — A worthless remedy sold with great confidence.
- Un lit de Procuste — A standard imposed regardless of what it does to the thing being measured.
- Le rocher de Sisyphe — A labor that must be repeated forever and never completes.
- Le supplice de Tantale — Having what one wants permanently in sight and permanently out of reach.
More French idioms
- Entre le marteau et l'enclume — Caught between two opposing forces with no way out.
- Un pavé dans la mare — A revelation or intervention that disturbs a settled situation.
- Il y a de l'orage dans l'air — Trouble is brewing.
- Rouler sur l'or — To be enormously wealthy.
- Valoir son pesant d'or — To be extremely valuable.
- Manu militari — By force; with physical compulsion.
From our untranslatable words
- Épanouissement — The full flourishing of a person — blooming into your most complete, radiant self. More t…
- Ressourcement — The act of returning to one's roots or origins to find renewal — going back to a place, t…
- Dépaysement — The disorienting yet often pleasant feeling of being far from home, immersed in the unfam…
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