You don't have to be a fervent believer to realize it: biblical expressions dot the French language.
All you have to do is listen:
"as old as Herod"
,
"the lost sheep"
,
"the return of the prodigal son"
or even
"the good Samaritan"
... We are fond of images and metaphors to support our point. .
Who better than the Bible, the ultimate repository for pictorial parables, to do this?
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But we would be surprised to take the measure of the influence of the sacred texts on our idiomatic formulas. We are sometimes unaware that some of them are taken directly from the words of the gospel. When we say for example
“to carry to the pinnacle”
, we are unknowingly quoting ... the Gospel according to Saint-Mathieu (4,1-11). More precisely, of its Latin version which says:
statuere super pinnaculum
, that is to say
"the (Jesus) to place at the top"
. As Denis Moreau notes in
No one is a prophet in his country, these words from the Gospels at the origins of our familiar formulas
(Seuil, 2019):
"It is from this sentence that the word 'pinnacle', which initially designates the top of a building, passed into French in the expressions we know"
.
"Good to hear, hi!"
,
"Each day suffices its pain"
,
"sow discord"
... Can you find the biblical origin of these French phrases?
The editorial team offers you a short test to check it.