Hello my dear friends and thank you for joining me for this new episode of the Authentic French podcast. And today, we are going to study together a French idiomatic expression, an expression that you will find very often in French newspapers, on French TV etc. and it is "à huis clos". This is the title of today's expression.
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Let's come to our expression "à huis clos" and start by discovering together the word "huis", because "huis", here, is not a way of saying "eight". The number "8", we sometimes say it orally... in any case, we sometimes pronounce it "hui". For example, there is: "J'ai huis_amis", so that doesn't work. "Il y a huit_enfants". In any case, there are certain cases in which the number "8" is pronounced "hui", especially when we pronounce it a little quickly. In any case, that is not the case here.
Here, the word "huis" is a somewhat south africa whatsapp number data old-fashioned way of talking about the main entrance door of a house. Today, we would rather say: "Take the door, enter through the main door or just the door, for that matter." At one time, the term "huis" was used to talk about the main entrance door of a house.
Clos, it means… or when we talk about something that is closed, we talk about something that is closed. It is the past participle of the verb “to close”. If I say “we are going to close the subject”, it means we are going to close the subject, we are going to stop talking about it. Something that is closed is something that is closed. If the door is closed, the door is closed.
To understand the origin of this expression, we need to go back to some basic Latin. The word "hus" from the Latin "hustium", it appeared in 1050 and gave "huis", which means "door" suddenly. And the expression "à huis clos", it will appear later, in the 16th century, to say "at closed door" or "behind a closed door". This was the origin of the expression.