Well hello, dear friends! Thank you for joining me for this new episode of the Authentic French podcast. And today, I suggest you discover a new French expression, an idiomatic expression that is part of the expressions used by the French on a daily basis. You can hear it on television, come across it in a film, in a book or when you watch a series. So it is important to understand these French idiomatic expressions and that is why since 2011 we have been explaining an expression of this type to you every week, in this case, this week, we have chosen to talk to you about the expression "avoir les pieds sur terre".
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Let’s come to our expression “having one’s feet on the ground”.
So the verb "avoir", it is very simple, very widespread, it is one of the most used verbs in French, it is an auxiliary. Here it means to possess. Avoir is to possess.
Feet are the parts of your body that touch new zealand whatsapp number data the ground. So it's the lower end of the body, it's really what's at the lowest part of your body and it's what we use to walk, to move around. And here, I'm going to tap my foot on the ground. So the foot is really what's at the very bottom of our body.
And the earth is the surface on which humans stand and walk. The earth is the ground. The earth is our planet. So when we say "the earth" or "having our feet on the ground", we think of the earth and therefore the earth's surface, the place where we walk, the ground, quite simply.
So I think that just by understanding the meaning of these words, you can already understand a little bit of the meaning of the expression. So its origin is vague, but we can notice that there is a notion of stability and gravity. When we have our feet on the ground, we are stable. Moreover, the word "earth" is often associated with reality and stability. The foot, it symbolizes our capacity to act in life, because we use our feet to move for example. So the expression, it suggests a solid connection with the world around us, with everything that is around us.