French word of the day: bidouilleurs

A brief comment about background: I was born in Montreal, which is supposedly the third-largest French-speaking city in the world after Paris and Kinshasa, but as a result of family history and linguistic segregation (which has some nasty history) I grew up speaking English. These days I work in English, like most scientists, but I speak a lot of French socially. So from time to time I come across a neat French word. I think it might be good for my general education to post little comments on them here.

There's going to be a mini Maker faire here in Montreal at the end of the summer. Neat! But what caught my eye was that it seems the French word for "maker" is "bidouilleur". So what? you ask. The French word "bidule" is a kadigan roughly equivalent in meaning and seriousness to the English "thingamajig", so a bidouilleur (or bidouilleuse!) is someone who operates on thingamajigs. Which is pretty accurate, really. 

The People's Microphone

I went down to Occupy Montreal the other day. It was pretty impressive, really; the modest park, surrounded by banks, was filled with tents and people making art. Particularly amusing was the statue of Queen Victoria wearing a Guy Fawkes mask (pictured on the right). But what got me thinking was the People's Microphone.

Cyclotron! Isotope! Logarithme!

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?