ficar de bico calado

Portuguese

Meaning

to keep quiet, to zip it

Example

É melhor você ficar de bico calado sobre o que viu ontem à noite.

You better keep quiet about what you saw last night.

Origin

The image is transparent: bico literally means "beak," used colloquially for the mouth, so ficar de bico calado is to keep one's beak shut — to stay silent and let nothing slip.

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More idioms

meter os pés pelas mãosto mess things up, to put one's foot in it não ter papas na línguato not mince words, to be blunt queimar a largadato jump the gun dar com os burros n'águato fail miserably, to come up empty estar por forato be out of the loop, to be clueless