trinque (french)

The religions sow, the people carry the can / pay the piper.

thanks, istvan!

Eh? No idea what trinque means but "carry the can" and "pay the piper" have two completely different meanings. They can't both be right!

The full expression is "He who pays the piper calls the tune" ie is in charge.

"Carry the can" means to take the blame and comes from the days before indoor plumbing when someone lowly would literally have to carry the can full of night soil out of the house to get rid of it.

I've thought that "to pay the piper" also means to accept the unpleasant results of something you have done, and that "to carry the can" has a similar meaning. Of course, I'm no English native speaker, and my French is rather limited too.

An online dictionary translates "trinquer" into "take the rap". Perhaps this is a better translation.

#4 -- You're right about "pay the piper," at least in the US.

"Carry the can" is a new one for me. I've never heard that idiom before. Michael Quinion calls it mainly British English. He relates it to beer, not chamber pots
>The first recorded cases are from the Royal Navy in the late 1920s, though Eric Partridge, in his Dictionary of Historical Slang, says it had been around since the late nineteenth century. In his Dictionary of Forces’ Slang he suggests that the idiom refers to “the member of a gang or party who fetches the beer for all and then has the melancholy task of returning the empty”. The job of carrying the group’s ration of beer was obviously one that laid you open to much unpleasantness if you spilled any or dropped the can.
>There’s an older slang expression that’s probably relevant: to carry the keg, also as to carry the cag. Cag and keg are variants of the same dialect word, meaning to offend or insult (cag or kag was also once British Navy slang for one of those arguments in which everybody is shouting and no one is listening). To carry the cag then was to hold a grudge, or to be easily annoyed or unable to take a joke. There’s an obvious pun in the phrase on keg, a small cask, being something that you literally might carry, as you would figuratively carry a grudge.
>It may be that carry the can developed as a joking reference to the older idiom, but then took on a life of its own.

If you look up "pay the piper," you find more definitions along the lines of "take the consequences" rather than "be in charge." (Or, as one source put it "money talks.") Some say it derives from the Pied Piper of Hamelin, although in that case, there were consequences for NOT paying the piper.

I've always thought that "pay the piper" had the connotation that the person with power had to exercise it responsibly, which I think is different to accepting the blame or taking the rap for a situation.

Trinquer in French has two meanings: the traditional one is of clinking glasses together when you drink to something
The second to pay the price for something. In French -- subir is the definition I find most often.