Y a pas de lézard !

Literally: There's no lizard!

Example: “Tu veux que je t'emmène à la gare ? Y a pas de lézard !” — You want me to drive you to the station? No sweat!

English equivalent: No sweat

Origin: Three explanations, none settled. Pierre Merle's 1998 slang dictionary puts it in the music world, where since the 1970s a lézard is a parasitic hiss that ruins a take and forces a re-record — a problem, and an irritating one. Others take it from the lézarde, a crack in a wall, named for the lizard both by its shape and by the reptile's habit of slipping inside such cracks: no lézard between two people means no crack in the relationship. A third, which holds up well, reaches for a forgotten slang sense of lézard recorded by Alfred Delvau in 1866 — a bad companion, a deceiver — so the absence of one means nobody is being played. The phrase spread in the 1980s, carried first by the song Dur-dur from the band Alex et les lézards and then by Michel Blanc's film Marche à l'ombre, where it recurs throughout.