Donner des noms d'oiseaux

At the HOA meeting, everything was perfectly civilized until someone mentioned the color of the shutters. Within minutes, neighbors were flinging insults across the room like seagulls fighting over a French fry.   The argument became so heated that a pigeon perched on the windowsill looked genuinely offended, puffed up its chest, and appeared to be considering a formal complaint on behalf of the bird community.
The French expression donner des noms d’oiseaux à quelqu’un literally means “to give someone bird names.” Fortunately, it has nothing to do with ornithology.
It means to insult someone, to call someone names, often during an argument.

Origin

The expression dates back to at least the 17th century. At the time, many birds were commonly used as metaphors for human flaws and unpleasant traits:

• une dinde (a turkey) → a foolish person
• une oie (a goose) → a simpleton
• un vautour (a vulture) → a greedy or unscrupulous person
• une buse (a buzzard) → an idiot
• une pie (a magpie) → someone who talks too much

Because people frequently insulted one another by comparing them to birds, donner des noms d’oiseaux gradually came to mean using any kind of insult, whether bird-related or not. Today, the expression rarely refers to actual bird names at all.

But why birds?

Birds were not uniquely targeted. Many animals have traditionally served as metaphors for human virtues and vices in French and other European languages. Birds simply offered an especially colorful cast of characters.

In earlier times, people lived much closer to animals than we do today and observed them daily. Our ancestors looked at a goose and thought, “What a ridiculous creature.” They looked at a peacock and thought, “What a show-off.” They looked at a magpie and thought, “Will that thing ever stop talking?”

Before long, the entire aviary had been unwillingly drafted into service as a dictionary of human shortcomings. Somewhere, a committee of birds was probably holding emergency meetings to protest the damage being done to its reputation.

Medieval bestiaries and fables further reinforced these associations. Writers such as Jean de La Fontaine popularized the idea that animals embodied recognizable human qualities, both good and bad.

Birds were especially useful because there are so many species with distinctive appearances and behaviors. Whether vain as a peacock, chatty as a magpie, or predatory as a vulture, there always seemed to be a bird ready to lend its name to an insult—whether it approved or not.

Examples

• Après l’accident, les deux conducteurs se sont donné des noms d’oiseaux pendant cinq minutes.
  After the accident, the two drivers called each other every name in the book for five minutes.
• Quand il est en colère, il distribue facilement des noms d’oiseaux.
  When he's angry, he easily starts insulting people.