/mɛtʁ le pje dɑ̃ lə pla/ lit. ‘put your feet in the dish’
French idiom, familiar. To say or do something tactless that embarrasses you or upsets someone.
Draft Not yet checked by a native French speaker.
How do people use Mettre les pieds dans le plat
?
Familiar French, fine in conversation and in the press. It’s usually in the passé composé: “il a mis les pieds dans le plat”. Unlike the English, it can also be on purpose: French Wiktionary says it covers blurting out a blunt truth that everyone else was tiptoeing around, so a journalist can praise a politician for “mettre les pieds dans le plat”.
Also said mettre les pieds dans les plats (Québec)
Mettre les pieds dans le plat
in real sentences
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Il a mis les pieds dans le plat.
He put his foot in it.
Tatoeba, sentence by pkill, CC BY 2.0 FR
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Jérôme a mis les pieds dans le plat.
Jérôme put his foot in it.
Tatoeba, sentence by nimfeo, CC BY 2.0 FR
Where does Mettre les pieds dans le plat
come from?
French Wiktionary dates it to the 19th century, and its oldest quoted example is from a Georges Feydeau farce, Monsieur chasse ! (1892). Everyone pictures a serving dish on a dinner table. French Wiktionary disagrees: it says “plat” here meant a stretch of shallow water, where stepping in gets you stuck in mud, which makes the mess worse. Neither story comes with hard evidence.
Mistakes learners make with Mettre les pieds dans le plat
Using the singular, “mettre le pied dans le plat”. It’s both feet, “les pieds”, every time.
Other French idioms like Mettre les pieds dans le plat
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?
Send a correction, or a sentence you’d actually say with it. Everything is read before anything on this page changes.