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Informal French Expression
| Meaning | to misbutton, to button wrong | |
| Literally | to attach Monday with Tuesday | |
| Register | informal | |
| Pronunciation | [ah tah shay loo(n) dee ah vek mar dee] | |
| IPA | [a ta ʃe lœ̃ di a vɛk maʁ di] | |
Usage notes: French children are sometimes taught the days of the week with the help of button-down shirts: each day is equivalent to one button. From this comes the wonderful French idiom attacher lundi avec mardi.* Unfortunately for English speakers, there’s no idiomatic equivalent – we’re stuck with just the matter-of-fact "misbutton" or “button wrong.”**
Par exemple…
| Fais attention, tu viens d’attacher lundi avec mardi. | Pay attention, you just misbuttoned your shirt. | |
| Tu as dû être pressé ce matin – tu as attaché lundi avec mardi ! | You must have been in a hurry this morning – you buttoned your shirt wrong! |
Variations and synonyms
* You might hear other combinations of two days: mardi avec mercredi, samedi avec dimanche, etc. Also, you can use boutonner rather than attacher.
Other variations:
- attacher / boutonner lundi dans le mardi
- attacher / boutonner Pierre avec Paul
- attacher / boutonner Pierre avec Jacques
- boutonner Metz avec Paris
- Québec : être boutonné en jaloux
By extension, you can use these expressions to mean "badly dressed."
** Rich Hall, creator of Sniglets, attempted to fix this lacuna with shirtlop but it never really caught on.
- Saturday is longer than Sunday.
- Monday comes before Sunday.
- Your Monday is longer than your Tuesday.
Again, the day combinations are very flexible.
And Cambridge dictionary:
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