When Gavin Newsom was asked at a press conference this week about Donald Trump’s move to take control of building permits in Los Angeles’ wildfire-stricken neighborhoods, the California governor first said it was absurd, likely illegal and designed to do nothing more than provoke reaction.

Then, to punctuate his point, he turned to an evocative metaphor.

“It’s just typical Trump,” Newsom said, “trying to, forgive me, it’s a French phrase: ‘piss on the grasshoppers to hear them sing.’”

Mon dieu! Pissing on singing grasshoppers is quite the image in any language— one I’d never heard before and other people apparently hadn’t either. His words earned quick ridicule from the pugilistic Democratic governor’s conservative naysayers and reporters included the odd phrase in their articles, but the question of what the heck the governor was talking about remained unanswered.

I consider myself a bon vivant when it comes to linguistic delicacies and, so, I set out to investigate. Google offered no help, either in French or English. So I reached out to the governor’s press team for an answer. While I waited, I put the mystery to several French experts. They were amused, but just as stumped as I was.

“I’ve never heard that expression but translating in my mind, the closest expression I can find is ‘faire chanter les cigales’ which means ‘to make the cicadas sing,’” wrote Atiyeh Showrai, director of the University of Southern California’s French language program, in an email.

“However, that expression doesn’t seem relevant in this context as it means to add flavor and warmth to life,” Showrai concluded, adding that this phrase originated in Provence in the south of France.

I thought I might be getting somewhere when I heard from Bernard Tranel, a professor of linguistics at University of California, Irvine and author of the textbook “The Sounds of French: An Introduction.”

The French do have a common “pissing-related expression,” Tranel explained in an email. And the saying, “is used to characterize a totally useless action,” he wrote. “So its use would be quite appropriate here since, as you point out, Gov. Gavin Newsom has ridiculed President Trump’s executive order as meaningless.”

Voila!

Not quite.

The expression, ‘c’est comme pisser dans un violon,’ Tranel explained, translates to ‘it’s like pissing in a violin.’

Violins to grasshoppers is a big leap.

Tranel had some other guesses, including a flatulent twist on Provence’s singing cicadas.

“I came across another (interesting and perhaps relevant) expression (from Provence) involving not exactly ‘grasshoppers’, but ‘cicadas’: ‘faire péter les cigales’ (‘make the cicadas fart’), which is similarly used to denote some useless action,” he said.

I was beginning to think the governor had made a real faux pax. I contacted the his office again to tell them French professors could not figure out what Newsom was saying.

Shortly after, Newsom spokesperson Tara Gallegos called me. She said that while she understood that it sounded like the governor was referencing a French phrase, that’s not what he intended. Instead, she said, Newsom was just signaling he was about to use dirty language.

“He wasn’t saying it was a ‘French saying,’” Gallegos said. “He was saying, like, ‘Pardon my French.’ Because he said ‘piss.’”

She agreed that, as far as she is aware, there is no French phrase about pissing on grasshoppers to hear them sing.

It was an explanation, but an unsatisfying one. How could the governor have thought to string these words together? The internet turns up no traces of the saying in English, and there is a kind of je ne sais quoi to the line.

“It certainly sounds French and is within the semantic range of all the other expressions with the verb ‘pisser’ — most of which indicate useless actions/words or the futility of something,” wrote Kelle Marshall, professor of French studies at Pepperdine University, when I emailed her about the governor’s comments.

I pressed Gallegos to find out if Newsom was not mangling some French saying, how the governor came up with the phrase. She said she’d talk to him and get back to us. “There’s a lot going on right now,” she said.

A day later — and after I first published an item about the mystery in Playbook — Gallegos texted back.

She had talked to the governor and told me she had been wrong when she said he was just excusing his uncouth tongue.

Newsom, Gallegos said, was quoting from a French poem his father would recite to him in English as a child. The poem, authored by Guillaume Apollinaire and published in 1918, is called “Aussi bien que les cigales” or “As well as the cicadas.”

“This is his memory that likely got whittled down to ‘pissing on grasshoppers to make them sing,’” Gallegos said.

She added: “Always happy to admit when I am wrong, especially when it’s about early 20th century French literature.”

Apollinaire wrote the poem in the trenches during World War I to exhort his weary countrymen to look to the cicadas, who burrow themselves into the earth, for rebirth and inspiration. While not quite on point with the governor’s original take on the president, the poem features multiple descriptions of cicadas pissing and singing. It has the bonus of aligning with our French experts’ view that the governor may have confused grasshoppers with these similarly vociferous insects, and who I’m sure would be just as likely to register their outrage if someone peed on them.