tache d’huile
n.— «Gallieni called this carefully coordinated military and social strategy the tache d’huile, the oil spot. Start out and carefully secure a hundred such bases and you are on your way to conquering a country.» —by Frederick Quinn French Overseas Empire May 30, 2000. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Emily in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is married to a native Dutch speaker, who points out that they buy groceries in a store, so why doesn’t grocery denote just one of those items and not the store where they’re sold? Originally, the French...
A Francophone who’s feeling low might say so with J’ai le moral dans les chaussettes. The idiom avoir le moral dans les chaussettes means “to have morale in your socks.” This is part of a complete episode.
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