Sick fuckin’ bag, dude

My friend Ander Opmeer, who lives near Rotterdam, happened to see a bag for sale in the train station and, knowing I like strong language, bought it for me:

It says, in the colours of Rotterdam, SJOUW ME DE TERING. That’s a turn of phrase particular to Rotterdam; it translates idiomatically to something like “Fuck, this is heavy” or “Working my ass off.” But that’s not what it means literally.

To find out what it means literally, you have to translate it word by word, because if you just drop it into Google Translate you’ll get “Screw me,” which, again, is not literal. My Dutch is a bit uneven, and I at first thought it literally meant “Show me tuberculosis.” But no. I made two mistakes. 

Need a Replacement PDQ?

If I say “We need a replacement PDQ,” do you know WTF that means? You might, or you might guess, but let’s face it: PDQ is Prime Dad Quality stuff. It was major popular in the middle 20th century, but now it’s mainly an old-style joke, retro like a Kodak Instamatic. You’re more likely to encounter it now in the name of the satirical composer PDQ Bach (invented by Peter Schickele in 1965, and last seen in concert in 2015) than in earnest.

So… yeah, if you don’t know what PDQ stands for, your odds of guessing it are only middling. If I said it meant PFQ, would that help? How about if I replaced it with RFN? Would you get that I meant we need a replacement immediately?

Yeet that skeet into the blue sky

Strong Language now has an account on Bluesky, @stronglang.bsky.social. Which means you can now get a skeet from Strong Language.

Which, depending on what variety of English you use when you’re at home, and your own personal inclinations, may be indifferent, or odd, or sketchy, or gross, or worth a shot.

Trump, you cat donkey dog

You may have heard that Donald Trump is a pussy ass bitch. You may have heard it, to be precise, from Chrissy Teigen; she called him that after he insulted her husband (John Legend) and her, back in 2019:

….musician @johnlegend, and his filthy mouthed wife, are talking now about how great it is – but I didn’t see them around when we needed help getting it passed. “Anchor”@LesterHoltNBC doesn’t even bring up the subject of President Trump or the Republicans when talking about….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 9, 2019

lol what a pussy ass bitch. tagged everyone but me. an honor, mister president.

— chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) September 9, 2019

It’s back in the news because we just learned that Trump tried to trump it – according to a former Twitter employee testifying before congress, the White House asked Twitter to take it down, and Twitter said no. You can read more about it on Slate, in an article by Heather Schwedel that quotes me, Jonathon Green, Ben Zimmer, and a couple of noted linguists.

Obviously, the real question for us on this here blog today is “Why did Donald John Trump object so strongly to being called a ‘cat donkey dog’?” 

Merde! “Emmerder” les emmerde

On December 10, 1896, the actor Firmin Gémier stepped onto the stage of the Théâtre de l’Œuvre and uttered the first word of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi: “Merdre!” The audience immediately lost their shit. For fifteen minutes, they screamed, shouted, whistled, and argued with each other, all because an actor in an avant-garde theatre had uttered a word perilously close to merde, which is French for “shit.” They were, you could say, pissed off.

On January 5, 2022, Emmanuel Macron, president of France, sat down with for a Q&A with readers of the newspaper Le Parisien and said, among other things, “Les non-vaccinés, j’ai très envie de les emmerder.” It was duly reported. His opponents lost their shit – or at least made indignant noises. The world press, for their part, gained their shit – or anyway one bit of good shit to draw readers like flies. The provocation was in both the wording and the sentiment: Macron said he really wants to emmerder the unvaccinated, and you can see that same merde in the bowels of the word. He didn’t mean he wants to shit on them, though – in English, we’d more likely say “piss them off.” (And it should be pointed out that Macron did say “pardon the expression” before using the term.*)

The world, and France, has changed quite a bit in 125 years; from being a word an actor can’t come close to saying on stage, merde has become a word that is just a bit impolite for a politician to say in public. Likewise, newspapers and other media sources that decades ago could never print “piss” can now use it in a headline – the first page of Google results I get (YRMV) for macron piss off brings up headlines from the BBC, The Guardian, Canada’s Global News, NPR, The Globe and Mail (Toronto), France 24, Reuters, CNN, and The Independent (UK).

Not that everyone was so gleeful in reporting it, of course. The New York Times dourly reported “Using Harsh Language, Macron Issues a Challenge to the Unvaccinated” – it did translate Macron’s quote as “The unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off,” but added “using a French word that is more vulgar” and, further down, explained further “Mr. Macron studiously used the word ‘emmerder,’ which is translated literally as ‘to mire in excrement’ and means to ‘annoy’ or ‘to give a hard time to.’”

There are two particularly pressing questions in regard to this news: 

1. Why is it emmerder and how do you use the word in conversation?
2. How did news sources in other languages translate it?