The idiom all mouth and no trousers came up last night at the French conversation group. We were actually looking for a French equivalent of all fur coat and no knickers and couldn’t find one, but did find an equivalent of all mouth and no trousers, which has a somewhat similar meaning.
According to the Oxford Dictionaries, to be all mouth and no trousers is to “tend to talk boastfully without any intention of acting on one’s words, while all fur coat and no knickers means to “have an impressive or sophisticated appearance which belies the fact that there is nothing to substantiate it” [source].
According to Wiktionary all mouth and no trousers comes from northern England, was originally all mouth and trousers, and refers to someone who is “superficial, engaging in empty, boastful talk, but not of real substance.” Apparently a US equivalent is all hat and no cattle, and there are many other idioms with the same meaning:
- all bark and no bite
- all bluff and bluster
- all crown, no filling
- all foam, no beer
- all hammer, no nail
- all icing, no cake
- all shot, no powder
- all sizzle and no steak
- all talk
- all talk and no action
- all wax and no wick
- all show, no go
An equivalent in Welsh is pen punt a chynffon dima (“pound head and halfpenny tail”). Are there similar idioms in other languages?
The only ones from your list I can remember hearing with any frequency in the US are “all sizzle and no steak” and “all talk/all talk and no action”. The others are new to me, though “his bark is worse than his bite” is a common US expression with a similar meaning, and the Finnish haukkuva koira ei pure (“barking dogs don’t bite”) in the same ballpark.
It certainly seems like ripe territory for phraseological neologisms: “all paper and no toner”, “all tortilla and no meat”, “all cutscenes and no gameplay”, “all hair and no shred”, etc.
Similar to all fur coat and no knickers is the Finnish moni kakku päältä kaunis, mutta silkkoa sisältä (many cakes are beautiful on the outside, but the inside is just “silkko”). Silkko is a type of bark bread, made during famine years from sour milk and the phloem of pine trees.
Looks like I’m able to comment on your blog again. Happy day ♥