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Another question about "why do the French say....."?


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Isn't this the eternal question for us foreigners in France?

All the "funny" French expressions and words that make us laugh or simply fill us with wonder?

Sports season everywhere and you can't help but notice what the commentators say.

For example, where we say two competitors are "neck and neck", the French say "coude à coude". 

Recently, I have noticed also that instead of saying "son équipe" or "son entourage" (about tennis players), the current preferred term seems to be "son clan".  In my quaint old fashioned way, I only associate "clan" with groups of Scottish people wearing their particular colour and pattern of tartan...oops!

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Yes, I agree about footbore though I did look at pictures of Mbappe with the dressing on his broken nose.  Must be difficult breaking a nose?  I thought noses only have cartilage and not bone and so would be harder to break?

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Menthe, well mine feels a though it has bone!  I suspect otherwise it would have no shape and not be as rigid as they are.  But I didn't study biology longer than I had to, or even anatomy, so who am I to say!

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I am sure many on here have heard this expression long before I did (only a couple of months ago!)

"French leave" (in english)  "filer a l'anglaise".

Although the article I read expanded a bit on the way difference between the two countries in leaving a dinner etc.

  The English leave without saying goodbye and the French say goodbye without leaving.

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Yes, Lehaut, traitor as I am, I use filer à l'anglaise myself!  Though I always explain that WE say French leave.  So everybody laughs and no harm done.

As to leaving, I think it's rather the English who say goodbye and not leave.  Or at least, they linger in the garden, at the gates, before getting into their cars, etc.  I have been known to say, albeit jokingly, have you no homes to go to?

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23 hours ago, Judith said:

Menthe, well mine feels a though it has bone!  I suspect otherwise it would have no shape and not be as rigid as they are.  But I didn't study biology longer than I had to, or even anatomy, so who am I to say!

Judith, I do think the nose has no bone because, if you looked at a skull, the place where the nose would have been, is merely a triangular shaped hole.  If there was bone, there'd be, well, a nose bone on the skull, won't there?

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Menthe, I see what you mean.  I hadn't thought of that .. but then, how do you get a broken nose?  Which is where we came in .. bit of investigation called for perhaps ..

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I seem to remember from school that there was at least two bones in the nose and they were connected to the skull with cartilage. The reason why you don't normally see them after death is that they've 'fallen through the hole'. Same with the bones in the ear. 

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I can confirm that the nose (nasal passage) contains both bone and cartilage.

As a kid I had difficulty with breathing through my nose and I underwent surgery of partial cartilage removal, the bone scraped and adenoid removal to cure the problem.

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Phew! another of life's mysteries solved🙂

I understand that Mbappe is going to play wearing a sort of nose shield. 

I don't follow football as a rule but do have a passing interest, if only because you simply can't entirely get away from the ghastly Euros.  Having said that I do like to watch Mbappe, he is to football as Dupont is to rugby, in my humble and uninformed opinion!

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No, those guardsmen or whatever they are called look like toy soldiers with their silly bearskin headpieces and gold braid on all those red tunics!

Shades of the dastardly cad Captain Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd.  It's no wonder someone or other will pass out in the hot sun.

Anyway is it Britain or Ruritania?

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filer à l’anglaise: possible origins, L’expression proviendrait de l’ancien verbe "anglaiser", pour "voler". Par la suite, on aurait utilisé "filer à l’anglaise" pour désigner la façon discrète dont part un voleur qui vient de faire son coup. Par analogie, on a aussi vu apparaître l’expression "partir comme un voleur".

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