tomber dans les pommes

Tomber dans les pommes

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This French idiomatic expression means ‘To faint/lose consciousness/pass out‘. Its literal meaning is ‘to fall in the apples‘. Listen to an application of this idiom:

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‘Marie était si fatiguée qu’elle est tombée dans les pommes.’ (Marie was so tired that she  fell in the apples.)

Its etymology is still unclear, but one theory is that it may be derived from ‘tomber dans les pâmes’, which is also coming from ‘se pâmer‘  (to faint). But again, this is just a tentative explanation. Another possible explanation has been drawn from a letter George Sand, a famous female French writer sent to her mother in which she explains “being in cooked apples” while she was recovering from an illness. She wrote: ‘Je suis un peu dans les pommes cuites‘, which denotes a state of great physical exhaustion.

We may never know the real etymological source of this French idiom, but whatever this may be, I wish I could fall in a chocolate bucket if I fainted.