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Silliest French word I learnt so far

I'm posting this on this thread only because there are so many French speakers here, and it would be irrelevant to most others.

Tonight on France 2 I watched one of the most moving programmes/TV films I've seen for a very long time. I nearly didn't watch it, because I don't really rate Samuel Le Bihan as an actor (he does "Alex Hugo", which we only watch because it's set in les Hautes Alpes (our second spiritual home after having spent a year in Briançon on a teacher exchange) so we like spotting the filming locations!); he's rather clunky, but not here. He himself has an autistic child and wrote the scenario for this programme. The young boy who plays the central rôle (and who himself is not autistic) does a remarkable job. I hope he wins an award.

We nearly watched something else. I'm so glad we didn't.

You'll need a VPN to be able to watch it online outside France. I use Windscribe (free).
https://www.france.tv/series-et-fictions/telefilms/2016971-t-en-fais-pas-j-suis-la.html

If autism is something that touches you, but especially if it doesn't, and you understand French, please find the time to watch it. Remarquable. My youngest is borderline Aspergers, and we thought we had a hard time through adolescence ... :(
 
Yes I saw a little bit of it, just the bit where the dad took the kid to a special school and on the way home they past a wind turbine which amused the child, I got distracted but it seemed like an exceptional film.
 
Interesting, I may have a bash at that.

covering related ground, I once saw a Belgian film in Flemish that covered learning disability and senile dementia very well. It featured a woman in her 40s caring for her elderly mother, she was desperate to find a place in a home that would maintain her mother's quality of life and give her some freedom. The twist was that her mother met a young woman with a learning disability in the home, they made a connection and spent hours sharing family photos, flowers, leaves and all manner of things incomprehensible to others. Meanwhile the main character learned that freedom is in many cases just freedom to spend time on your own doing not very much. It was very well done.
 
The translation is generally accurate, but nobody speaks that sort of argot anymore. The underworld ain't what it used to be.
The main inaccuracy IMHO could be "on n'a pas le droit de crever de la mousse". Se faire de la mousse (or du mouron) means (or meant, as nobody says that anymore) to worry or to get worked up about something. So "on a pas le droit de crever de la mousse" would be something like "nobody should die of worry".
 
L'Homme qui murmurait à l'oreille des chevaux seems a bit clunky compared to the horse whisperer.
 
This morning I learnt that bof is an abbreviation of beouf, oeufs, fromage and is used to express disapproval of something because in the war only the elite and the Germans were able to access this kind of food and the letters BOF would hang outside shops when available.
 
richardg said:
This morning I learnt that bof is an abbreviation of beouf, oeufs, fromage and is used to express disapproval of something because in the war only the elite and the Germans were able to access this kind of food and the letters BOF would hang outside shops when available.
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There are two quite different bof, actually three if you count le beauf. Do not confuse:
  • BOF: as you describe, except it stands for beurre/oeufs/fromage and designated what would now be called a crèmerie or a fromager (= a shop selling dairy products). Popular during WW2 and in the 50s. I bet you 80% of the French population don't know this meaning. See Jean Dutourd's novel "Au Bon Beurre" about a BOF during the Occupation: a sardonic book about war profiteering, but totally out of fashion (the kind of book my father enjoyed) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Au_bon_beurre
  • Bof! (onomatopoeic, 1960s onwards, spread by comic strips), meaning not bothered, average, mediocre. Synonymous with "pfff" or "pffft". Very common usage.
  • Beauf: short for beau-frère, brother in law. Popularized in the 70s by the late Cabu of Charlie-Hebdo and Hara-Kiri fame, a loud, uncouth person "l'archétype du Français râleur, raciste, violent, odieux en toutes circonstances". There may be a connection with the BOF character, but the spelling and usage is different.Very common usage. https://livre.fnac.com/a7410307/Cabu-Cabu-L-integrale-Beauf
 
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PsB said:
There are two quite different bof, actually three if you count le beauf. Do not confuse:
  • BOF: as you describe, except it stands for beurre/oeufs/fromage. Popular during WW2 and in the 50s. I bet you 80% of the French population don't know this meaning. See Jean Dutourd's novel "Le Bon Beurre" about a BOF during the Occupation: a sardonic book about war profiteering, but totally out of fashion (the kind of book my father enjoyed).
  • Bof! (onomatopoeic, 1960s onwards, spread by comic strips), meaning not bothered, average, mediocre. Synonymous with "pfff" or "pffft". Very common usage.
  • Beauf: short for beau-frère, brother in law. Popularized in the 70s by the late Cabu of Charlie-Hebdo and Hara-Kiri fame, a loud, uncouth person "l'archétype du Français râleur, raciste, violent, odieux en toutes circonstances". There may be a connection with the BOF character, but the spelling and usage is different.Very common usage. https://livre.fnac.com/a7410307/Cabu-Cabu-L-integrale-Beauf
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it was becasue i wondered if bof and beauf were the same that I looked in the first place!

So in fact BOF and bof are the same pronunciation? i think I hear bof used a lot. Not BOF.....
 
richardg said:
it was becasue i wondered if bof and beauf were the same that I looked in the first place!

So in fact BOF and bof are the same pronunciation? i think I hear bof used a lot. Not BOF.....
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I’m not sure I’ve ever heard BOF pronounced. Probably spelled out (b-o-f).
Bof! has a short o, beauf is long and deep…
 
PsB said:
The translation is generally accurate, but nobody speaks that sort of argot anymore. The underworld ain't what it used to be.
The main inaccuracy IMHO could be "on n'a pas le droit de crever de la mousse". Se faire de la mousse (or du mouron) means (or meant, as nobody says that anymore) to worry or to get worked up about something. So "on a pas le droit de crever de la mousse" would be something like "nobody should die of worry".
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Mouscaille possibly, in sense 3 here

https://fr.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/mouscaille
 
On a three-month stint developing vocoder software at (then) France Télécom CNET in Lannion, a term I had to learn was coefficient de surtension. A term for which engineers elsewhere just used Q - but I did wonder about just how that might fit culturally if used in France.
 
John Phillips said:
On a three-month stint developing vocoder software at (then) France Télécom CNET in Lannion, a term I had to learn was coefficient de surtension. A term for which engineers elsewhere just used Q - but I did wonder about just how that might fit culturally if used in France.
Click to expand...
French electrical engineers love to talk about Q.
 
I realise this is a big ask, but it’s going to bug me a lot if I can’t find the answer, so I wonder if any French speakers feel up to answering this question. I had a conversation about the issue once here with @Steve 67 and @PsB

On the radio this morning - France Culture, so I guess it’s good French.

Le cliché veut que les Français n'aiment pas parler d'argent, que ce serait tabou.

The question, if you haven’t already guessed, is why serait and not soit?
 
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