Hello everyone! I hope you are well. I am super happy to be back with you for a new episode of the Français Authentique podcast from pillar . And like every week, like every podcast, well I will try to explain to you the meaning of a French idiomatic expression that we, the French, use and that will be very useful for you to understand for the rest of your learning of our beautiful language. Last week, we talked about the expression ” ça me fait une belle jambe “. So, don’t hesitate to go listen to it if the expression intrigues you. Today, we are going to see the meaning of the expression “passer du coq à l’âne”.
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Here we go again with the explanation
of our expression of the day, “passer du coq à l’âne”. Let’s start with the explanation of the words.
The first word is the verb “to pass”, which means to move from one place to another, to change state, to change position.
The second word is the word “rooster”. A rooster is a farmyard bird. It is the male of the hen.
And finally, the donkey, well it’s also korea whatsapp number data an animal, it’s a gray mammal, generally. It’s the cousin of the horse with long ears.
Concerning the meaning of the expression. Well, originally, we find the expression in the 14th century in the form saillir du coq à l’âne. In old French, the word “asne”, which was written tracy allikian project manager asne, designated the female duck, the female of the duck. And the word “saillir”, the verb “saillir”, means to mate. Now, it is said that the rooster sometimes tries to mate with its cousins, the female ducks. Over time, the word “asne” disappeared, but the expression remained. The asne became the donkey, the equine, and the verb “saillir” would have been popularized as sauter, then passer. Here, well it means to move abruptly from one subject to another without transition, without a logical link.
I will give you three examples right away
three different contexts so that you can understand the meaning of this expression.
First example: “I was telling him about my trip to Mexico when he changed his mind and asked me if I liked horses.” So, here we see a person talking about his trip to Mexico and the other person following up and answer ing with a completely different subject. So, here, we say that the person changes his mind, he suddenly goes a complete list of unit phone numbers from one subject to another without transition, without a logical link between the two discussions.
Second example: “When I talk to my father, I struggle to follow his train of thought because he tends to jump from one subject to another.” So, here, the person is talking about his father
And third example: “During the conference, the guest panicked and, because of the stress, jumped from one topic to another without ever developing his ideas”. So, here, we understand that this is a stressed person, who cannot finish his discussions, his ideas, and who, as a result, goes from one subject to another without transition, without a logical link between his words.
That’s it for the three examples. I think that now you have been able to contextualize, replace the context of this expression in order to understand it better.