I discovered an interesting French expression yesterday while ferreting around in the dictionary – la gueule enfarinée, which literally means ‘the floured mouth’, but actually refers to someone who is ‘wet behind the ears’, i.e. new, untrained, inexperienced, immature, innocent, callow or naive (synonyms from The Chambers Thesaurus).
The word gueule usually refers to the mouth of an animal, and is also a slang word for the human mouth, which is normally bouche. Equivalent words in English include gob, mug, snout, cakehole, kisser, trap, etc – do you have any others? It comes from the Old French gole, from the Latin gula (gullet, throat, gluttony, palate), which is also the root of the English word gullet.
Why having a floury mouth is a sign of being inexperienced is a mystery to me. Does anyone know the origins of this expression?
