When I said “Merci beaucoup” (thank you very much) to the French people after a service done, they usually burst out laughing, but nobody would give me an explanation.
Many years later I met a girl who had graduated as a language teacher in French and Italian, and I told her of this wartime experience.
She explained that “beau” means beautiful and “coup” is a slang term for “rounded bottom”. The correct way to say “beaucoup” is to sound them close together, and make the “coup” sound like the “coo” a dove would make.
In my schoolboy French I had been saying “Thank you, beautiful rounded bottom”, and she said that for obvious reasons this variation is not taught in the classroom.
She also supplied the English translation of the Italian propaganda postcards. Pp67-68
(If I ever gain access to the required equipment, I will post images of these postcards. They show Italian soldiers looking heroic, a subhuman, very angry “Bolshevism” and a German and an Italian soldier removing one of John Bull’s teeth. RM)
No comments:
Post a Comment