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).

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

Hmm. IMO, coffee is foul, nasty stuff. So a better phrase may be jus de merde. But, that aside, isn't most coffee (south) American? Am I just wrong, or does this refer specifically to the Starbucks kind of thing from the US?

[wimble.livejournal.com]

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

[venta.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing they mean the sort of coffee that's sold as "Americano" - ie ordinary espresso topped up with hot water. So yes, Starbucks/US stuff rather than Colombian coffee.

[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Then again, it may be chronically out of date.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.

[smiorgan.livejournal.com]

Most "Americano" coffee is probably shit anyway, because there are very few suppliers of decent espresso beans (for a long time the Monmouth coffee house in Covent Garden didn't do Italian style coffee for this very reason).

And the French like very dark roasted coffee but made using a filter drip, so you don't scorch the beans. So to them, the difference between French Press/Drip coffee and "Americano" is like the difference between Tropicana OJ with bits and tesco long-life value OJ from concentrate.

And they drink gallons of the stuff at the same strength as espresso, but never need to go to the pissoir, what's up with that?

[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.

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

> the French refer to American coffee as
> jus de chaussettes (or "sock juice").

Sigh.

Next time I'll have to bring over some beans and my coffee press.

I wonder if all this critique of American taste is actually a cunning plan to get us to always bring food stuffs.

-= Me.

p.s. If you want REAL Sock Juice, try Valerian Root tea. It definitely tastes like diluted dirty feet.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hullo, you back in the land of the living, then ? (ie recovered from jetlag, it's not that I think Europe is the land of the dead).

And I never dissed American coffee. I don't really drink coffee any more these days :(

Anyway: rant in return. What foodstuffs can't we do properly ? And have you scared people with your tales of sweetcorn on pizza yet ?

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

> recovered from jetlag

Yepper! I had one day (Saturday) of being too sleepy to stay up past 8:00 pm (preventing me from seeing the gang at Faces) but it's all back to normal now.

> I never dissed American coffee

Yes. And a good thing too! :)

> I don't really drink coffee any more these days

I have a 'french' press, an espresso machine, and my own grinder. Most of my days start off with 4 shots of espresso in half a glass of iced chocolate milk... with various cups of catch-as-catch-can throughout the day.

When I hear the phrase "drip coffee", I assume someone is talking about a hanging brew-filled transfusion bag, to supply caffeinated goodness directly to the blood stream :)

> return rant

Alas, I am rant-less. Everything was excelent.... though I still think fish and chips are not so much a meal, as an efficient grease delivery system.

I can't even complain about the Chicken Vindaloo Balti that I couldn't quite finish. Ya can't blame the food for the fact that I'm a big, soft, wussy-boy.

> Sweet Corn on Pizza

When I related this odd and strange behavior to some friends here in the States, I was informed that it's not so rare over here either... though it's more a Northern thing. I just never ate pizza with Yankees before.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I can't even complain about the Chicken Vindaloo Balti that I couldn't quite finish. Ya can't blame the food for the fact that I'm a big, soft, wussy-boy.

:)

I've been led to believe that _corpse_, while living in Chicago, reassured a waiter who was trying to persuade him not to order a vindaloo with the words "it's all right, I'm British".

[http://users.livejournal.com/_corpse_/]

American-Indian did seem to be generally milder yet more tangy that British-Indian.

Still nice though.

Mmm... Chicken Jalfrezi... mmmmnnnngngnhhh...