{"id":9111,"date":"2013-09-06T15:24:42","date_gmt":"2013-09-06T15:24:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=9111"},"modified":"2013-09-06T15:24:42","modified_gmt":"2013-09-06T15:24:42","slug":"la-gueule-enfarinee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=9111","title":{"rendered":"La gueule enfarin\u00e9e"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I discovered an interesting French expression yesterday while ferreting around in the dictionary &#8211; <em>la gueule enfarin\u00e9e<\/em>, which literally means &#8216;the floured mouth&#8217;, but actually refers to someone who is &#8216;wet behind the ears&#8217;, i.e. new, untrained, inexperienced, immature, innocent, callow or naive (synonyms from <em>The Chambers Thesaurus<\/em>).<\/p>\n<p>The word <em>gueule<\/em> usually refers to the mouth of an animal, and is also a slang word for the human mouth, which is normally <em>bouche<\/em>. Equivalent words in English include gob, mug, snout, cakehole, kisser, trap, etc &#8211; do you have any others? It comes from the Old French <em>gole<\/em>, from the Latin <em>gula<\/em> (gullet, throat, gluttony, palate), which is also the root of the English word gullet.<\/p>\n<p>Why having a floury mouth is a sign of being inexperienced is a mystery to me. Does anyone know the origins of this expression?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I discovered an interesting French expression yesterday while ferreting around in the dictionary &#8211; la gueule enfarin\u00e9e, which literally means &#8216;the floured mouth&#8217;, but actually refers to someone who is &#8216;wet behind the ears&#8217;, i.e. new, untrained, inexperienced, immature, innocent, callow or naive (synonyms from The Chambers Thesaurus). The word gueule usually refers 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":[104,107,111,10,15,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-etymology","category-french","category-language","category-latin","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9111","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=9111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}