To have a frog in your throat
Meaning: To have difficulty speaking due to hoarseness.
Language: English
Literally: (Already vivid in English)
Category: Animals
Origin: The story often attached to this phrase — that medieval physicians treated sore throats by placing a live frog in the patient's mouth — has no support behind it, and the phrase is far too recent for it in any case. It is American and nineteenth-century, and the comparison needs no history to explain it: a hoarse voice genuinely does produce a low, cracked, intermittent croak, and laryngeal irritation produces a sensation of something lodged in the throat that will not clear. What did help spread the expression was commerce. A throat lozenge marketed in the United States in the 1890s was sold under the name Frog in Your Throat, and the advertising put the phrase in front of a national audience at exactly the moment it was becoming fixed in ordinary speech.
Equivalents in other languages
- French: avoir un chat dans la gorge — literally: to have a cat in the throat
More idioms — Animals
- It's raining cats and dogs — It's raining extremely heavily.
- To have butterflies in your stomach — To feel nervous excitement.
- القرد بعين أمه غزال (al-qird bi-ʿayn ummihi ghazāl) — Parents see their children as beautiful no matter what.
- اللي ما يعرف الصقر يشويه (illi ma yaʿrif al-ṣaqr yishwīh) — Failing to recognize something valuable and destroying it.
- Matar a cobra e mostrar o pau — To prove you actually did what you claim.
- Noyer le poisson — To confuse the issue deliberately; to dodge a question.
More English idioms
- Bob's your uncle — And there you have it; simple as that.
- take the biscuit — to be the most outrageous or remarkable thing; to win or excel.
- beat around the bush — to avoid addressing the main point; to speak indirectly.
- give someone the cold shoulder — to deliberately treat someone with indifference or ignore them.
- let the cat out of the bag — to reveal a secret inadvertently.
- pull your punches — to hold back; to be less forceful than you could be.