I have measured out my life in coffee spoons

[venta]

Popping upstairs for my morning toast-and-evil, I fell into conversation with a couple of colleagues. One of them tells me that the French refer to American coffee as jus de chaussettes (or "sock juice").

I like this phrase, and may adopt it. Not for American coffee, which I have no particular opinion on, but bad coffee in general.

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

MMmm... sock juice!

For the linguistically limited:

Systran, who I think are running a babelfish (I can't get to altavista, for some reason), translate jus de chaussettes as watery coffee.

Damn them! They've got an idiom list.

But you can get round it by asking them to translate "sock juice" into french. That does the trick.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Damn them! They've got an idiom list.

They have ? Oooh, that's interesting. I approve. Though I do think they should give the literal translation as well (just in case I had actually been putting socks through my juicer).

[wimble.livejournal.com]

And for your next trick, work out how to extract the idiom list, and publish the good ones!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ha. They don't know my favourite[*] French idiom:

elle a toute la monde sur la balcon

Then again, it may be chronically out of date.

(lit. "She has the whole world on the balcony" - to describe a woman with large breasts.)

Anyeone else got any good 'uns, lanugauge of your choice ?

[*] or "only", as they say. My idiomatic French more sort of doesn't exist.

[stompyboots.livejournal.com]

Faire de carrotte, meaning to take the piss. Bugser (as in Bugs Bunny) has the same meaning. Although they're more slang than idiomatic, they are French, and I like 'em.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Drinking-related, there's etre pommé, meaing to be very drunk. It's from Normandy, so I think the etymology is more like "to be apple-d" (i.e. had a goodly dose of cider/pommeau/calvados) rather than "to be rounded", but it could be a combination of both.


It's not really idiom, but my favourite linguistic story is Persian (and I'm not up to rendering the actual Persian here, alas!). Many Iranians like puns as much as I do, and before the revolution there was a famous forced demonstration where the people were supposed to be shouting "Long Live The Shah!". Of course, they couldn't resist to overtly for fear of repression, but if you pronounced the Persian slightly differently it came out as "The Shah Is Running Off With All The Money!", which the crowd were happy to shout enthusiastically.