Tailler une pipe
Meaning: To perform fellatio. Vulgar.
Language: French
Literally: To cut a pipe
Category: Daily Life
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.
More idioms — Daily Life
- 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.
- Tirer le portrait — To take someone's photograph.
More French idioms
- 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.
- Manger sur le pouce — To eat in a hurry, standing up.
- Cucul la praline — Twee; soppy; embarrassingly naive.
- Pour des prunes — For nothing; in vain.
- S'en moquer comme de l'an quarante — To not care in the slightest.
From our false friends
- Attendre — Actually means 'to wait for'. J'attends le bus = I'm waiting for the bus. For attend an e…
- Actuel — Actually means 'current' or 'present-day'. Actuellement = currently — not 'actually'.
- Blesser — Actually means 'to wound' or 'to injure'. Je suis blessé = I am injured — not blessed.
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