Warning for speakers of French: “gros mots” follow!
The French would use ‘merde/merdique’ or ‘putain/putain de’ as the closest thing to ‘fuck’. So ‘un putain de marteau’ (note the masculine even if ‘putain’ is feminine, more of that later) or ‘un marteau de merde’ for a ‘fucking hammer’ (something to remember next time you squash your fingers!)
So I would say “Putain, merci!” or “Merde, merci. Merde!” with added gesture to show relief. (You cannot say ‘de merci’ as merci is not a thing, here, to be insulted…)
But you could also find the word ‘putain’ objectionable, sexist (as it means ‘whore’). In that case, use ‘La vache’ or ‘Oh la vache’ which is usually employed to denote either pain or relief and is also a little bit milder.
I’ll now spend the rest of the evening drinking heavily, alternatively cursing Marine Le Pen and Putin, and trying my darndest to translate ‘clumsy as fuck’…
In Québec we use a lot more religion-sourced (i.e. Catholic) swear words than in France. “Merde” is common, but “putain” is not. “Calice”, written “calisse” (pronounced closer to “colisse”) is the word I grew up with. It simply means “chalice”, but is the common synonym for “fuck”. If you want to up the ante a bit you can add “tabernak” (i.e. tabernacle) as in “tabernak de calisse”, “ostie de callisse” (i.e. host of chalice) or even “crisse” (i.e. Christ!) as in “crisse de calisse”. I can’t imagine my Muslim mom would have approved.
I remember my first trip to France when I learned that not only did the “joual” (a corruption of the French word for horse — i.e. a kind of québécois street French, that I grew up with in Montreal) have very little relation to European French, but even the normal vocabulary was very different. Paradoxically, there were many words in Québec that were entirely in French where common usage in France simply adopted the English, i.e. “stationnement” (in Quebec) vs. “parking” in France, or “croustilles” in Montreal vs., simply, “chips” in France. I remember being shocked when, out for an early morning jog in shorts and running shoes, I passed my concièrge who remarked: “Bonjour mademoiselle, qu’il fait beau pour faire le footing!” (i.e. “Morning miss, lovely day to go jogging!”).
Déjà vu, eh? (or is that too much cultural appropriation?)
I’m surprised we don’t have more punning around with ‘putain’ and Putin.
Le Pen, and the ex-Trot ‘lefty’ candidate were BOTH in Vlad’s pocket. And the French pseud-lefties were pleading that the candidates weren’t offering a clear choice…..At least they weren’t accusing them of cis-privilege.
I’m guessing the Québec refusal to adopt English words has to do with Francophone nationalism? That there’s more of a felt need to avoid all Anglicisms because of the history?
Sea monster #6: 35% is still worryingly hig, given the extreme nature of her views.
I wonder if part of the problem is that people simply do not see the bigotry. Back before our 2015 election, a guy I sort of know (he’s the husband of a friend of my wife) nnounced that he was probably going to vote Ukip. I was gobsmacked – he’s a bit odd, but I wouldn’t peg him as in any way a prime bigot. I think he just saw them as “not the usual lot” and didn’t see their repellent nature.
I have to believe that people don’t realise the enormity of the views of the people they’re voting for. If they do realise, then it means that that sort of hatred and bile is much more common than we believed.
Thanks to French speakers for the more sensible translations. My French is barely schoolboy level, unfortunately; I was just trying to make a small joke against myself as a typical English speaker who has no truck with all this foreign lingo.
Yes, that’s certainly a factor, especially in the school/educational environment. There was a conscious effort to create French words in the domain of technology, e.g. “courriel” for “email” (derived from “courrier électronique”; “courrier” meaning mail) is the standard word (coined) in Quebec while the original “anglisisme”, email, is more common in France… outside Le Monde and the Académie française, that is. So while “building” is common in France, it’s never heard in Quebec, where it is always “édifice”.
Graham, I have some relatives who say they “love Trump” and voted for him because it’s time our government was run by a successful businessman (a stupid idea to begin with, and Trump is the last person I would think of to fill that bill). They said ever since Ross Perot, they had been eager for a businessman to run the government.
I don’t see these folks any more (they are actually relatives of my ex), but I did see a lot of them during the time my ex and I were married. I found much of the conversation surrounding me during these years cringe-worthy, with casual racism, casual sexism, and homophobic jokes thrown around like leaves on the wind.
I suspect that, at least in their case, they are unwilling to own up to their own noxious beliefs, because that might ostracize them from some of their friends, and so they come up with this excuse. They might brush off the other things by pointing at what a “pig” Bill Clinton was, or something like that. They haven’t the crude bluntness of my own family, who readily own to their assumptions that people of color, women, and people with different sexual orientations are inferior. But they too aren’t bigots; oh, no, it’s just science. And, of course, the desire not to die in a terrorist attack, which the stupid lefties are inviting by their stupid policies of stupidly letting stupid refugees into the country (their phrases, not mine, I assure you).
I’m not doctrinaire about the issue. Over the years (centuries) there are probably many more French words and expressions that entered the English dictionary than the reverse. And enriched it enormously. But English is by far the dominant international language today and the internet has amplified that dominance. Still, I can’t help but cringe at “un building de haut standing” !
It’s not that the French (well, some) have seized on English words and expressions and swallowed them without really digesting them, but that they’ve adopted words based on shallow fashion rather than durable, value-added meaning. Connotation over denotation. It’s happened not only in French. As a colleague recently educated me, contemporary Japanese discourse is full of laughable anglicisms. Of course, it works the other way, too, and I constantly (very diplomatically, I hope) correct English speakers chez nous when they borrow and misuse French terms.
It’s funny how borrowing from other languages can be pretentious or enriching or both. I do a lot of borrowing, and frequently wonder if I’m being pretentious and/or mangling what I’m borrowing.
My personal favourite bit of Franglais is used a fair bit around the office whenever a computer or program isn’t cooperating: “Il est fuckez!”
A friend, watching an episode of Star Trek dubbed into French, was amused enough when he heard Kirk say “Stoppez, Monsieur Spock!” that he played around with conjugating “stopper”: je stoppe, tu stoppes, il stoppe, nous stoppons, vous stoppez, etc. Just before typing this in, out of curiousity I searched online and, yes, there is an actual list of “Conjugaison du verbe stopper,” for all cases and tenses.
A few decades ago, when the wave of French nationalism was at its height, most stop signs across Quebec were reworded from “Stop/Arrêt” (even though these signs were an incongruous coupling of an English imperative verb with a French noun) to “Arrêt”. Then language mavens pointed out that “stop” had long since entered the French language as a verb and these days you’ll see quite a lot of simple “Stop” signs.
BTW, (getting priggish again), it should probably be “Il est fucké” :-) … and I hate smileys!
Mentioning the stop signs reminded me of this clever bit of graffiti that showed up after Bill 101 (aka the Charter of the French Language) passed, where bilingual stop signs (ARRET / STOP) had the “STOP” modified with red paint to eliminate the S, the crossbar of the T, and the loop of the P, so the sign instead read “ARRET 101”.
But yes, we in France have a lot to learn from our Canadian cousins when it comes to the spread of franglais. In the too rare occasions when we propose an alternative it always seems so much more clunky that yours. I mean, we owe you the term ‘baladeur’ (for Walkman). My mind shudders when I try to think of what the geniuses at the Academy could have come up with!
Many years ago, Punch magazine had a regular column by Miles Kington called “Let’s parler Franglais”. I barely remember any of it, but the one phrase that stayed in my memory was “L’esprit boggle”.
iknklast: yes, I still see that unconscious, unthinking and unrecognised racism, misogyny, homophobia among too many of my contemporaries. They think they’re in favour of the far right for one set of reasons but fail to acknowledge their baser commonalities.
Well, that and their total inability to think critically about important matters…
“Yield” would seem to support your claim…but then what about “Caution”?
Just kidding. I’ve certainly always taken it to be a command, and I want everyone else to do the same. (Once I was in a car going through an intersection when another driver didn’t. It was unpleasant.)
Ophelia @ 37. I have attended all too many road accidents caused by one vehicle passing through a controlled intersection without stopping. At open road speeds (100km/h or more) the consequences of hitting another vehicle are devastating.
Just in case people were wondering about #32, “Va, mon fils, et que Dieu te blesse!” is a franglais mistranslation of what in English would be “Go, my son, and may God bless you!” into French as “Go, my son, and may God injure/hurt you!” To “bless” in French is “bénir”, not “blesser”. http://dictionary.reverso.net/french-english/blesser (A correct translation would be “Va, mon fils, et que Dieu te bénisse”.)
So there, forgive me, the joke is now dead… we murder to dissect.
This must come as an enormous relief to France’s beleaguered Muslim community. At a time when incidents of islamophobia have reached new heights ( and here we were thinking that to be impossible) Macron’s victory comes as an auspicious sign.
Macron’s long history holding a whole variety of elected offices is just what the situation needs. That invaluable political expertise, that blinding transparency, will be brought to bear on the country’s ongoing efforts to integrate its growing Muslim community. The pressing need to adequately accommodate this growing demographic should come as a real test to France’s ongoing commitment to diversity and multiculturalism.
After all, nowadays the Far Right can show up wearing the most unlikely of disguises.
Is that considered a landslide in France?
Hell yes, some pushback against modern fascism and nationalism at last.
I think it’s considered a landslide anywhere that has free elections.
How do you say “Thank fuck” in French?
So, it’s only the US and the UK that have mroe than their fair share of fucking idiots, then.
E Harper @4: Remercier foutre?
Graham, is the French glass 65% full or 35% empty?
I’ll endeavour to work that into conversation next time I’m in France, Graham!
That’s a literal translation of sorts (except it uses the infinitive, which “fuck” isn’t), but I strongly doubt it’s idiomatic. It’s clumsy as fuck.
Idiomatic phrases are a bugger to translate.
Pretty much impossible by definition, in fact.
Yeah, I wouldn’t use that…
Warning for speakers of French: “gros mots” follow!
The French would use ‘merde/merdique’ or ‘putain/putain de’ as the closest thing to ‘fuck’. So ‘un putain de marteau’ (note the masculine even if ‘putain’ is feminine, more of that later) or ‘un marteau de merde’ for a ‘fucking hammer’ (something to remember next time you squash your fingers!)
So I would say “Putain, merci!” or “Merde, merci. Merde!” with added gesture to show relief. (You cannot say ‘de merci’ as merci is not a thing, here, to be insulted…)
But you could also find the word ‘putain’ objectionable, sexist (as it means ‘whore’). In that case, use ‘La vache’ or ‘Oh la vache’ which is usually employed to denote either pain or relief and is also a little bit milder.
I’ll now spend the rest of the evening drinking heavily, alternatively cursing Marine Le Pen and Putin, and trying my darndest to translate ‘clumsy as fuck’…
Putin est un putain qui mange de poutine.
Et merci, Arnaud.
Dodged a bullet there… Just hoping the Fifth Republic continues to hold.
Marci indeed, Arnaud. As for the result of the election, all I can say is “Oh the cow”.
Marci? My typing is crap.
In Québec we use a lot more religion-sourced (i.e. Catholic) swear words than in France. “Merde” is common, but “putain” is not. “Calice”, written “calisse” (pronounced closer to “colisse”) is the word I grew up with. It simply means “chalice”, but is the common synonym for “fuck”. If you want to up the ante a bit you can add “tabernak” (i.e. tabernacle) as in “tabernak de calisse”, “ostie de callisse” (i.e. host of chalice) or even “crisse” (i.e. Christ!) as in “crisse de calisse”. I can’t imagine my Muslim mom would have approved.
I remember my first trip to France when I learned that not only did the “joual” (a corruption of the French word for horse — i.e. a kind of québécois street French, that I grew up with in Montreal) have very little relation to European French, but even the normal vocabulary was very different. Paradoxically, there were many words in Québec that were entirely in French where common usage in France simply adopted the English, i.e. “stationnement” (in Quebec) vs. “parking” in France, or “croustilles” in Montreal vs., simply, “chips” in France. I remember being shocked when, out for an early morning jog in shorts and running shoes, I passed my concièrge who remarked: “Bonjour mademoiselle, qu’il fait beau pour faire le footing!” (i.e. “Morning miss, lovely day to go jogging!”).
Déjà vu, eh? (or is that too much cultural appropriation?)
I’m surprised we don’t have more punning around with ‘putain’ and Putin.
Le Pen, and the ex-Trot ‘lefty’ candidate were BOTH in Vlad’s pocket. And the French pseud-lefties were pleading that the candidates weren’t offering a clear choice…..At least they weren’t accusing them of cis-privilege.
Fascinating, Helene.
I’m guessing the Québec refusal to adopt English words has to do with Francophone nationalism? That there’s more of a felt need to avoid all Anglicisms because of the history?
Sea monster #6: 35% is still worryingly hig, given the extreme nature of her views.
I wonder if part of the problem is that people simply do not see the bigotry. Back before our 2015 election, a guy I sort of know (he’s the husband of a friend of my wife) nnounced that he was probably going to vote Ukip. I was gobsmacked – he’s a bit odd, but I wouldn’t peg him as in any way a prime bigot. I think he just saw them as “not the usual lot” and didn’t see their repellent nature.
I have to believe that people don’t realise the enormity of the views of the people they’re voting for. If they do realise, then it means that that sort of hatred and bile is much more common than we believed.
Thanks to French speakers for the more sensible translations. My French is barely schoolboy level, unfortunately; I was just trying to make a small joke against myself as a typical English speaker who has no truck with all this foreign lingo.
Ophelia @19,
Yes, that’s certainly a factor, especially in the school/educational environment. There was a conscious effort to create French words in the domain of technology, e.g. “courriel” for “email” (derived from “courrier électronique”; “courrier” meaning mail) is the standard word (coined) in Quebec while the original “anglisisme”, email, is more common in France… outside Le Monde and the Académie française, that is. So while “building” is common in France, it’s never heard in Quebec, where it is always “édifice”.
So interesting. There are plenty of French people who dislike Franglish words, or at least there used to be. But they seem to have lost the battle.
Graham, I have some relatives who say they “love Trump” and voted for him because it’s time our government was run by a successful businessman (a stupid idea to begin with, and Trump is the last person I would think of to fill that bill). They said ever since Ross Perot, they had been eager for a businessman to run the government.
I don’t see these folks any more (they are actually relatives of my ex), but I did see a lot of them during the time my ex and I were married. I found much of the conversation surrounding me during these years cringe-worthy, with casual racism, casual sexism, and homophobic jokes thrown around like leaves on the wind.
I suspect that, at least in their case, they are unwilling to own up to their own noxious beliefs, because that might ostracize them from some of their friends, and so they come up with this excuse. They might brush off the other things by pointing at what a “pig” Bill Clinton was, or something like that. They haven’t the crude bluntness of my own family, who readily own to their assumptions that people of color, women, and people with different sexual orientations are inferior. But they too aren’t bigots; oh, no, it’s just science. And, of course, the desire not to die in a terrorist attack, which the stupid lefties are inviting by their stupid policies of stupidly letting stupid refugees into the country (their phrases, not mine, I assure you).
Ophelia @22,
I’m not doctrinaire about the issue. Over the years (centuries) there are probably many more French words and expressions that entered the English dictionary than the reverse. And enriched it enormously. But English is by far the dominant international language today and the internet has amplified that dominance. Still, I can’t help but cringe at “un building de haut standing” !
Ha! That certainly grates.
Ophelia @25,
It’s not that the French (well, some) have seized on English words and expressions and swallowed them without really digesting them, but that they’ve adopted words based on shallow fashion rather than durable, value-added meaning. Connotation over denotation. It’s happened not only in French. As a colleague recently educated me, contemporary Japanese discourse is full of laughable anglicisms. Of course, it works the other way, too, and I constantly (very diplomatically, I hope) correct English speakers chez nous when they borrow and misuse French terms.
(Jeez, I hope that doesn’t sound too priggish!)
It doesn’t!
It’s funny how borrowing from other languages can be pretentious or enriching or both. I do a lot of borrowing, and frequently wonder if I’m being pretentious and/or mangling what I’m borrowing.
My personal favourite bit of Franglais is used a fair bit around the office whenever a computer or program isn’t cooperating: “Il est fuckez!”
A friend, watching an episode of Star Trek dubbed into French, was amused enough when he heard Kirk say “Stoppez, Monsieur Spock!” that he played around with conjugating “stopper”: je stoppe, tu stoppes, il stoppe, nous stoppons, vous stoppez, etc. Just before typing this in, out of curiousity I searched online and, yes, there is an actual list of “Conjugaison du verbe stopper,” for all cases and tenses.
Richard @28,
A few decades ago, when the wave of French nationalism was at its height, most stop signs across Quebec were reworded from “Stop/Arrêt” (even though these signs were an incongruous coupling of an English imperative verb with a French noun) to “Arrêt”. Then language mavens pointed out that “stop” had long since entered the French language as a verb and these days you’ll see quite a lot of simple “Stop” signs.
BTW, (getting priggish again), it should probably be “Il est fucké” :-) … and I hate smileys!
Helene @29
Mentioning the stop signs reminded me of this clever bit of graffiti that showed up after Bill 101 (aka the Charter of the French Language) passed, where bilingual stop signs (ARRET / STOP) had the “STOP” modified with red paint to eliminate the S, the crossbar of the T, and the loop of the P, so the sign instead read “ARRET 101”.
Richard @31,
Google images has a few modified “Arrêt 101” signs.
Helene, I can’t remember the name of the author, a Quebecois, musician or comedian, who once said : “Va, mon fils, et que Dieu te blesse!”
It’s still my favourite Franco-English joke.
But yes, we in France have a lot to learn from our Canadian cousins when it comes to the spread of franglais. In the too rare occasions when we propose an alternative it always seems so much more clunky that yours. I mean, we owe you the term ‘baladeur’ (for Walkman). My mind shudders when I try to think of what the geniuses at the Academy could have come up with!
Many years ago, Punch magazine had a regular column by Miles Kington called “Let’s parler Franglais”. I barely remember any of it, but the one phrase that stayed in my memory was “L’esprit boggle”.
iknklast: yes, I still see that unconscious, unthinking and unrecognised racism, misogyny, homophobia among too many of my contemporaries. They think they’re in favour of the far right for one set of reasons but fail to acknowledge their baser commonalities.
Well, that and their total inability to think critically about important matters…
Mind you, “stop” can be a noun too, as in bus stop, this is the last stop, they came to a stop, etc.
Arnaud @ 32,
Love it (but never heard it, before… I’ll try to track it down).
Ophelia @35,
Yes, of course. But, it would seem to me that on a “Stop” sign it would be a command (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/stop-sign … and … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_sign) rather than a descriptive noun. Interestingly, in the Wikipedia entry, under “Sign variants”, there is a long explanation of the Arrêt / Stop issue in Quebec.
“Yield” would seem to support your claim…but then what about “Caution”?
Just kidding. I’ve certainly always taken it to be a command, and I want everyone else to do the same. (Once I was in a car going through an intersection when another driver didn’t. It was unpleasant.)
Ophelia @ 37. I have attended all too many road accidents caused by one vehicle passing through a controlled intersection without stopping. At open road speeds (100km/h or more) the consequences of hitting another vehicle are devastating.
Just in case people were wondering about #32, “Va, mon fils, et que Dieu te blesse!” is a franglais mistranslation of what in English would be “Go, my son, and may God bless you!” into French as “Go, my son, and may God injure/hurt you!” To “bless” in French is “bénir”, not “blesser”. http://dictionary.reverso.net/french-english/blesser (A correct translation would be “Va, mon fils, et que Dieu te bénisse”.)
So there, forgive me, the joke is now dead… we murder to dissect.
This must come as an enormous relief to France’s beleaguered Muslim community. At a time when incidents of islamophobia have reached new heights ( and here we were thinking that to be impossible) Macron’s victory comes as an auspicious sign.
Macron’s long history holding a whole variety of elected offices is just what the situation needs. That invaluable political expertise, that blinding transparency, will be brought to bear on the country’s ongoing efforts to integrate its growing Muslim community. The pressing need to adequately accommodate this growing demographic should come as a real test to France’s ongoing commitment to diversity and multiculturalism.
After all, nowadays the Far Right can show up wearing the most unlikely of disguises.