/ɑ̃ fɛʁ tu.t‿œ̃ fʁɔ.maʒ/ lit. ‘make a whole cheese of it’
French idiom, familiar. To treat a small problem as if it were a big one.
Draft Not yet checked by a native French speaker.
How do people use En faire tout un fromage
?
Familiar French, the sort of thing you say to a friend, a sibling or a colleague you know well. The “en” stands for the thing being fussed over: “il en fait tout un fromage”, or spelled out, “il a fait tout un fromage de cette histoire”. It turns up most in the negative: “n’en fais pas tout un fromage” (don’t make such a big deal of it).
Also said faire tout un fromage de (quelque chose), en faire un fromage
En faire tout un fromage
in real sentences
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Il en fait tout un fromage.
He’s making a big deal out of it.
Tatoeba, sentence by Myrano_, translation by lvxtrm, CC BY 2.0 FR
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Il aime en faire tout un fromage.
He likes making a huge fuss over it.
Tatoeba, sentence by Micsmithel, translation by tieguy, CC BY 2.0 FR
Where does En faire tout un fromage
come from?
Nobody has a documented story for it. French Wiktionary dates the expression to the 20th century and offers one explanation: you start with plain milk and end up with an elaborate cheese, so something simple has been turned into something complicated. That’s a reasonable reading of the picture, but it isn’t backed by an early source. It sits alongside “en faire tout un plat”, another food version of the same complaint.
Mistakes learners make with En faire tout un fromage
Dropping the “en”. “Il fait tout un fromage” sounds like he’s making cheese. You need either “en” or “de” plus the thing: “il en fait tout un fromage”, “il fait tout un fromage de ses notes”.
Other French idioms like En faire tout un fromage
Spot a mistake in En faire tout un fromage
?
Send a correction, or a sentence you’d actually say with it. Everything is read before anything on this page changes.