2023-12-19 10:24:30
“To put one’s foot in the dish” is to bring up a delicate subject in an unintentionally clumsy way. This is a perfectly illustrated expression whose origin is beyond doubt, right? Indeed, we like to imagine someone spoiling a feast by floundering in a dish filled with food. Well, that’s not it at all.
Do you speak terroir?
To understand this phrase, you have to go back to the beginning of the 19th century and go to Provence. Let us remember that at the time, our country was far from being linguistically unified. As researcher Christine Jacquet-Pfau recalls, “the democratization of education, in the last two decades of the 19th century, thus constituted the second wave of imposition of French, this time more directly on children who were now educated, but were still accustomed, for a large number of them, to practicing almost as many languages as there were regions.
A typically Provençal dish
For the Provençal of the time, the “dish” designated not a dish, but a shallow, muddy body of water. “Putting your feet in” therefore literally means “wading in a puddle of mud”, which clearly illustrates the idea of making a blunder or approaching a sensitive subject in a crude manner. Unsurprisingly, we find other similar expressions linked to clumsy or indelicate speech, such as “getting bogged down” or “sinking”. Moreover, the verb “gaffer” has the same origin, since for the Provençals, it was synonymous with “wading”.
#expression #put #foot #door