Carp : noun A carp is a large fish living in fresh, deep water, with a mouth provided with four barbels.
To have the eyes of a carp: to have an expressionless gaze.
Make the carp: go to seventh heaven.
Make carp's eye: Play the apple of the eye languidly, to light up either men when you're a woman, or women when you're a man.
Yawn like a carp: yawn strongly and several times in a row, like a carp out of water.
Look at someone with carp eyes: with gentle eyes.
Play carp: fall into a faint, faint.
Do the carp jump: be hanged.
Make the eye of carp: simulate the pleasure by turning eyes and showing the white.
Marriage of carp and rabbit: This expression testifies to certain poorly perceived unions, considered unnatural.
On a human scale, we would speak of the noble and the commoner (who contributed to the expression).
We do not in fact marry two different and opposite species.
The expression "Mute as a carp": completely silent.
If it is no wonder that a fish is used in such a comparison, why is it the carp that has had the great honor of representing the genus, and has been since 1612? It's all the more strange that we first used the more logical form dumb like a fish (Chez Rabelais, for example)!
The French linguist and lexicographer Alain Rey suggests two possibilities: the first would come from the French novelist and lexicographer Furetière (1619-1688) who wrote about the carp that it has no language; and as who has no tongue cannot speak… The second would come simply from the fact that the carp is a fish which frequently comes out of the water with its head out of the water, its mouth open and which, surely out of shyness, never yet utters a word. We can however note that the French writer George Sand (1804-1876) did not hesitate for a single moment to use the version dumb as a tench.