French is evocative.
Thursday, 31 August 2006 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daFrench 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.
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.
no subject
Date: Friday, 1 September 2006 11:22 am (UTC)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.