Pipe : nm Closed channel, duct with circular or rounded section (in rigid, flexible or flexible material).
Throat: water (…) the pipe.
Fill the pipe: drink well and eat well.
– The expression “give a tip (punctured)”: give more or less confidential information (at or outdated):
This is a slang expression that dates from the end of the XNUMXth century.
When you have information to give to someone, how do you proceed?
We'll probably bring his mouth to his ear and whisper the information that will flow through his ear canal to the inner ear. But isn't this auditory canal where information flows comparable to a pipe?
Here, we have just understood how what conveys information has become, by metonymy, intelligence itself.
As for the comparison of a burst pipe with erroneous information, it is easily understandable: a real burst pipe is useless, no more than this slang pipe when it is false.
– The expression “a family a stovepipe”: A family that practices sexual relations between its members.
This expression is very familiar, not to say vulgar. But the image it conveys is perfectly understandable for anyone who has had the opportunity, at least once in their life, to install a wood or coal stove with all its exhaust piping. He was able to see that it is made up of sections (or sleeves) which fit into each other.
Is it really necessary to explain this metaphor further?
This expression is the title of a play written by the French poet and writer Jacques Prévert (1900-1977) in 1933, in which seemingly respectable bourgeois actually practice adultery, incest and homosexuality and love affairs with the staff while they hypocritically claim to be very virtuous.