{"id":10395,"date":"2014-09-12T15:49:25","date_gmt":"2014-09-12T15:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=10395"},"modified":"2014-09-12T15:49:25","modified_gmt":"2014-09-12T15:49:25","slug":"all-mouth-and-no-trousers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=10395","title":{"rendered":"All mouth and no trousers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The idiom <strong>all mouth and no trousers<\/strong> came up last night at the French conversation group. We were actually looking for a French equivalent of <strong>all fur coat and no knickers<\/strong> and couldn&#8217;t find one, but did find an equivalent of all mouth and no trousers, which has a  somewhat similar meaning. <\/p>\n<p>According to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oxforddictionaries.com\/definition\/english\/be-all-mouth-and-no-trousers\">Oxford Dictionaries<\/a>, to be all mouth and no trousers is to &#8220;tend to talk boastfully without any intention of acting on one\u2019s words, while all fur coat and no knickers means to &#8220;have an impressive or sophisticated appearance which belies the fact that there is nothing to substantiate it&#8221; [<a href=\"http:\/\/www.oxforddictionaries.com\/definition\/english\/be-all-fur-coat-and-no-knickers?q=fur+coat\">source<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p>According to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/all_mouth_and_trousers#English\">Wiktionary<\/a> all mouth and no trousers comes from northern England, was originally all mouth and trousers, and refers to someone who is &#8220;superficial, engaging in empty, boastful talk, but not of real substance.&#8221; Apparently a US equivalent is <strong>all hat and no cattle<\/strong>, and there are many other idioms with the same meaning: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>all bark and no bite<\/li>\n<li>all bluff and bluster<\/li>\n<li>all crown, no filling<\/li>\n<li>all foam, no beer<\/li>\n<li>all hammer, no nail<\/li>\n<li>all icing, no cake<\/li>\n<li>all shot, no powder<\/li>\n<li>all sizzle and no steak<\/li>\n<li>all talk<\/li>\n<li>all talk and no action<\/li>\n<li>all wax and no wick<\/li>\n<li>all show, no go<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>An equivalent in Welsh is <em>pen punt a chynffon dima<\/em> (&#8220;pound head and halfpenny tail&#8221;). Are there similar idioms in other languages?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The idiom all mouth and no trousers came up last night at the French conversation group. We were actually looking for a French equivalent of all fur coat and no knickers and couldn&#8217;t find one, but did find an equivalent of all mouth and no trousers, which has a somewhat similar meaning. According to the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,111,10,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-french","category-language","category-welsh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}