One of the French Wikipedia's more amusing pages: Vocabulaire du capitaine Haddock. (Sadly, it is no longer named "list of Captain Haddock's insults".)
For those of you suffering from cultural deprivation, Captain Haddock is a friend of the young reporter Tintin. He is an old sea captain, and is therefore often drunk and forever cursing. Rather than the more usual grawlixes, Captain Haddock's cursing is inventive and often bizarre, calling people things like "bashi-bazouk", "macaque", or the three in the title of this post. (I don't know what the English translations are like, but I assume they kept the colour and variety of the insults. My school library only had the books in French.)
Wikipedia being Wikipedia and Tintin being extremely popular among French speakers, a list of all these diverse insults was created in 2004 and has now ballooned into a categorized, fully referenced list of links to dictionary meanings and articles. Isn't the Internet great?
Posts
1 comment:
The English insults are similar; they translate better than most humour. In particular "bashi-bazouk" is commonly used, although I had no idea until now that it was a real word.
Now I feel like compiling a similar list of his insults in English, but perhaps my time would be better spent reading those books in French.
Post a Comment