I have measured out my life in coffee spoons

[venta]

Popping upstairs for my morning toast-and-evil, I fell into conversation with a couple of colleagues. One of them tells me that the French refer to American coffee as jus de chaussettes (or "sock juice").

I like this phrase, and may adopt it. Not for American coffee, which I have no particular opinion on, but bad coffee in general.

Comments

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Drinking-related, there's etre pommé, meaing to be very drunk. It's from Normandy, so I think the etymology is more like "to be apple-d" (i.e. had a goodly dose of cider/pommeau/calvados) rather than "to be rounded", but it could be a combination of both.


It's not really idiom, but my favourite linguistic story is Persian (and I'm not up to rendering the actual Persian here, alas!). Many Iranians like puns as much as I do, and before the revolution there was a famous forced demonstration where the people were supposed to be shouting "Long Live The Shah!". Of course, they couldn't resist to overtly for fear of repression, but if you pronounced the Persian slightly differently it came out as "The Shah Is Running Off With All The Money!", which the crowd were happy to shout enthusiastically.