{"id":9780,"date":"2014-03-21T17:10:47","date_gmt":"2014-03-21T17:10:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=9780"},"modified":"2014-03-21T17:10:47","modified_gmt":"2014-03-21T17:10:47","slug":"mountains-and-molehills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=9780","title":{"rendered":"Mountains and molehills"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Making<\/p>\n

I discovered yesterday that the French word for mole is taupe<\/strong> \/top\/, and I wondered if this might be related to the English word taupe, which, according to the OED<\/a>, means ‘A brownish shade of grey resembling the colour of moleskin’ or in others words, mole-coloured. <\/p>\n

The English word taupe comes from the French, which comes from the Latin talpa<\/em> (mole), which is of unknown origin, according to Wiktionnary<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mole-related words and expressions in French include:<\/p>\n

– taupini\u00e8re = molehill
\n– taupier = mole catcher
\n– \u00eatre myope comme une taupe = to be blind as a bat
\n– noir comme une taupe = pitch-black<\/p>\n

The French equivalent of to make a mountain out of a molehill is se faire une montagne d’un rien<\/em> or faire une montagne d’une taupini\u00e8re<\/em>. What is the equivalent of this phrase in other languages?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I discovered yesterday that the French word for mole is taupe \/top\/, and I wondered if this might be related to the English word taupe, which, according to the OED, means ‘A brownish shade of grey resembling the colour of moleskin’ or in others words, mole-coloured. The English word taupe comes from the French, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,107,111,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-etymology","category-french","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9780","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=9780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}