Sucrer les fraises
Meaning: To have trembling hands; by extension, to be doddering.
Language: French
Literally: To sugar the strawberries
Category: Food & Drink
Origin: The shaking of a sugar spoon held over a bowl of strawberries resembles the tremor of degenerative illness. Aurélien Scholl's Poivre et Sel (1901) has a colonel joke that fifty years of absinthe left a soldier shaking so badly the affliction became 'precious for sugaring strawberries'. The popular claim that it refers to the pleated ruffs called fraises worn in the 16th and 17th centuries has no support — no citation predates around 1900.
More idioms — Food & Drink
- Compter pour du beurre — To count for nothing; to be disregarded.
- Mettre du beurre dans les épinards — To improve one's financial situation; to make life a bit more comfortable.
- Beurré comme un p'tit Lu — Thoroughly drunk.
- Un compte d'apothicaire — A needlessly complicated calculation, usually one padded in the biller's favor.
- Tailler une bavette — To have a long, friendly chat.
- Une auberge espagnole — A place or discussion in which you find only what you yourself brought to it.
More French idioms
- Les Anglais ont débarqué — To have one's period.
- S'envoyer en l'air — To have sex.
- Sacrifier à Vénus — To have sex.
- La langue de bois — Rigid, evasive doublespeak — language cut off from reality that carries a deliberately ri…
- Sentir le fagot — To reek of heresy; more broadly, to arouse suspicion or invite condemnation.
- Faire ses ablutions — To wash oneself; to do one's daily toilet.
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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