Tailler une pipe

Literally: To cut a pipe

Example: “Dans ce roman noir, les dialogues sont crus : on y parle de tailler une pipe sans détour.” — In this crime novel the dialogue is raw: oral sex is mentioned without any euphemism.

Origin: A recent deformation of faire une pipe, crossed with tailler une plume, which means the same. The earliest attestations of faire une pipe are from the first half of the 20th century, among prostitutes; before that the usual phrase was faire un pompier. The route runs through tobacco. Working-class smokers of the period rolled their own, manufactured cigarettes being for the wealthy and for women, and a hand-rolled cigarette was itself called a pipe in slang — reportedly because it took about as much tobacco as a pipe did. From there the comparison is easy enough to make between rolling one, fingers first and then the tongue along its length, and the act being described. The older avaler la fumée, from the middle of the 19th century, sits in the same family. As for tailler une plume, Cellard and Rey trace it to the job — largely a woman's — of moistening the end of a goose quill with the tongue before cutting the nib. And pompier comes from firemen working their tank pumps by hand, the piston's back-and-forth doing the rest of the work alongside the closeness of pomper and pompier.