Monday 12 October 2009

Un lèche-bottes

You may know that une botte is a boot but did you know a lèche-bottes is a servile flatterer? Well these are not words that I commonly hear in English but I have heard of sycophants and crawlers and even boot lickers but servile flattery is quite rare in my experience. So lèche-bottes is fairly easy to translate.

If you know that a PDG is the president directeur general which means you are talking about le patron, then you are in a position to understand “c’est un lèche-bottes du PDG”.

A bientôt

2 comments:

  1. I am an Indian married to a Mauritian, struggling to learn French for the past 8 years. I am afraid my language sense is very poor. My daughter's primary school books have helped me to some extent. When I read this article of yours I wished you were my French teacher. You couldn't have made it simpler and funnier. Keep it up.

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