French is evocative.

[da]

French is evocative.

So, this morning in my mailbox, I had about 12 emails from... [Tim]. [Tim] was some kind of Christian marketing mailing-list that apparently signed up a lot of people to an open list, late last night. Someone posted back to complain, and the mess was started. ("stop spamming me" "I'm not spamming you, stop spamming me" ...) Rgh. I procmailed it and beefed to the people who own the netblock, but before I did, there was the following post from someone at hotmail.fr:

"allez tous vous faire enculer avec vos mails de merde"

Now that's a great sentence:

"You can all go fuck each other in the ass with your shit mail".

I think that's about the sense of it; it's a command, but just "Go..." doesn't carry the "Allez tous vous". I knew all the words but "enculer", which oddly enough didn't come up in high-school French.

Sometimes, English language just doesn't measure up.

Comments

[poeticalpanther.livejournal.com]

Enculer - from 'cul', meaning 'ass', or 'end', as in cul-de-sac, the bum-of-the-bag. :)

[psychedelicbike.livejournal.com]

Bwahaha! I love it!

kourtneyshort and I just got back from watching the second last movie to ever show at Kings College. We saw Bon Cop, Bad Cop and surprisingly, I found it very enjoyable. Especially the three minute long scene where use of the word "tabernac" is explained, including how it can be a noun, an adjective, or conjugated as a verb. All with examples :)

[poeticalpanther.livejournal.com]

Chalice de tabernacle! Hostie!

My referee picture, as swearing always makes me think of being a referee.

[(Anonymous)]

In Italian: "inculare."

You bring up something that is really great about Italian (and French, and, I am assuming, other romance languages): there are such great concise yet descriptive verbs! In English, it can take a phrase or entire sentence to encapsulate something that exists as a single word in a romance language.

Because it's early and I haven't had my third cup of coffee yet, I can't think of other examples off the top of my head, though, unfortunately.....

Tom D.

[catbear.livejournal.com]

In the South, we say... All'y'all shut the fuck up.

[thingo.livejournal.com]

I have just found my new .sig.

[mynatt.livejournal.com]

I love French swear words, even if no-one takes me seriously when I say them with my strong English accent. :) I think "Go fuck all yourselves in the ass with your shitty emails" might be slightly closer since it preserves the reflective verb, but it's still not quite the same.

On a related note, have you seen this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_profanity)? It would be helpful to read before you watch Bon Cop, Bad Cop.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Heh. for different reasons, I happened to browse a different page of french swear-words, just the day before.

Perhaps we should've gone to see bon cop, bad cop at the King Theatre downtown, on the theatre's closing night ... But we didn't. :)