To lighten the stressful atmosphere around election 2024, this week’s post features several minutes of fun French humor with a handful of French brain teasers at the end. Enjoy!
Learn to recognize the tracks of different animals.
A week ago, I bought a book titled, “Learn to Know Yourself.”
That makes one week where I can no longer stand myself.
I put this fridge at the side of the road with a sign “for the taking”. Five days later, no takers.
So, I changed the sign to “for sale 150 euros”. Someone stole it during the night!!
The cellphone: that gizmo that brings you closer to people who are far away, but distances you from people who are right next to you…
Another set of clueless American parents… The little girl on the bike is without a helmet!
Certainly, you should plug the holes but it’s simpler and faster to keep adding water.
First day of medical school.
Blackboard: A patient cured is a client lost.
October. We change the hour to save energy.
November. City Hall installs Christmas decorations that can be seen from space.
Once elected, I’ll be a vegetarian.
The infernal cycle of winter.
RACLETTE—>leftover cheese—>RACLETTE—>leftover meat—>RACLETTE—>leftover cheese—>RACLETTE—>leftover potatoes—>RACLETTE…
On a farm, the horse is sick. The vet says to the farmer:
“If he isn’t better in 3 days, we have to put him down.”
The sheep, having heard everything, says to the horse:
“Horse, get up!”
The horse is too tired.
The second day the sheep says:
“Get up, fast!”
The horse still can’t…
The 3rd day the sheep says:
“Get up, if you don’t they’re going to put you down!”
The horse finally gets up.
Happy, the farmer says:
“We need to celebrate! Slaughter the sheep!”
Moral: Mind your own business and shut your trap…
Brain Teasing Jeux de Mots
The following jeux de mots would be spoiled if I tried to translate them. So, I leave it to you to figure them out. Let me know how you did.
There’s a lot of truth to the saying, “Humor is the best medicine”.
Thank you, Carol, for sharing these gems. My favorite one was the image of the Wolf lulling the Sheep to sleep with his pretend promise to become a vegetarian if elected…
You’re so right Gene, thank goodness for the humorists and thanks for weighing in.
The ones with the refrigerator and the smartphones are all too real. People are more likely to take something they believe to be of value, but that doesn’t mean they’ll pay for it. And everywhere we go there are people gawking at gadgets instead of paying attention to their surroundings. I question how much they really bring distant people together, though. Checking to see how many people clicked “like” on a photo of your lunch isn’t really getting to know anybody.
Those American parents can’t afford a helmet. They obviously need to save up to buy another gun.
What does raclette mean? It’s not in my dictionary.
I didn’t quite get the point of the guillotine image. Is it just that they’re using it to slice bagels in half when there are no criminals to execute?
I’ve sometimes had that experience in foreign countries, that I can make myself understood by the local people but can’t understand what they’re saying back to me. People in Japan tended to use gestures or write things down to make it easier.
I got a couple of the jeux de mots, most easily pas d’o / pas d’eau. And the similarity of the word “male” to the word for “evil” in some Romance languages has occurred to me before. The others I could not figure out, but perhaps they’ll come to me with further scrutiny.
Thanks for providing what was indeed an amusing diversion.
Raclette is a popular dish from the Alps which involves melting slices of raclette cheese on a hotplate and then scraping the sizzling goo onto potatoes or sausages. It’s delicious and very filling, much like fondue. Apparently, such feasts always end with leftovers that lead to more raclette.
Regarding the guillotine, I’m told they sell actual gadgets for slicing bagels that greatly resemble guillotines.
Good job on the Jeux de mots. For the image titled “l’emmentalist”, it might help to know that Emmental is the French version of swiss cheese. The dictée is funny because the last line in each version of the dictée is pronounced exactly the same way, while the meanings vary significantly. In France, kids don’t take spelling tests. Instead, a teacher gives a dictée, reading a passage that the kids have to write down without making spelling errors. Were this dictée given in school, the teacher might feel compelled to give full credit for either version even though the second isn’t exactly respectful. In the last jeu, French pronunciation is key.
Thanks for giving these a shot! They’re tricky.
OK, I get the dictée one now. As I recall, the film Amélie contained a somewhat similar joke early on. French is probably prone to such amusements, given the number of words or phrases which are pronounced alike but written differently. If they ever do seriously embark on la réform de l’orthographe, they should consider getting rid of all those unpronounced verb endings — all the present-tense verb forms except the ones ending in -ez and -ons are pronounced alike, so I don’t see the point in making students memorize all the other endings that don’t actually exist in the language.
I still don’t get the others, unless the last one is a play on the word “obey”. I can read what the cheese-head is saying, but I’m not getting the pun, if there is one.
Regarding the guillotine, I’m told they sell actual gadgets for slicing bagels that greatly resemble guillotines
I have got to get one of those. Also, this vegetable slicer. Now I see the significance of the birds — they’re gathering there because there are only bread crumbs, not blood.
Speaking of which, I’m sure that mouton wished he hadn’t intervened.
Cool. I’m glad you understand the dictée joke. I’ve become so accustomed to the spelling rules that I think I’d find a big reform annoying at this point. This amusing video might help explain why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnh5yezgvkQ (By the way, a friend sent this to me on April 1st but I didn’t open it for many months and when I finally did, I was aghast. I felt I was watching a slaughter until I realized it wasn’t serious.:-))
You figured out the Obey joke.
The cheese guy is an Emmentalist (play on mentalist).
Definitely, too bad for the sheep. I like this one because so often people with great intentions actually end up making things worse.
Thanks for the video. I could more or less follow it despite knowing so little of the language. The writing reforms in it seem logical to me, but in practice such things are pretty much never accepted. Back when I had a Chinese girlfriend in California, I once asked her about the ideas sometimes discussed in China for getting rid of the character system and writing Chinese with an alphabet, since the character system makes reading and writing so hard to learn. She said, “That’s just talk. They’ll never do it. The characters are too much part of the culture.” I would certainly find it difficult and unpleasant adjusting to a phonetic spelling of English. Our spelling eccentricities are not just arbitrary — they often differentiate words of Greek, Latin, French, or native origin, and preserve etymological connections that are distorted or lost in pronunciation.
Changing the language, as opposed to the writing (like trying to abolish the Z sound in the liaison examples) would never be accepted. People don’t change the way they naturally speak because of some edict. It would be like trying to make English-speakers say “childs” and “womans” for plurals instead of “children” and “women”, or “gooder” instead of “better”. I knew that Belgium uses more logical words for 70, 80, and 90 (it’s mentioned in The Story of French), but all widely-spoken languages have some regional variation. That’s just normal.
When it comes to spelling, French is really much easier than English. Once you learn French phonetics, you can easily look up an unfamiliar word that you’ve heard a French person speak because there are comparatively few ways to spell the sounds you’ve heard. The number system, however, could stand some touching up.
Merci, j’ai bien ri, surtout avec la dictée…
Moi aussi! Très drôle.
Parfait. Juste ce dont j’avais besoin… (Ain’t got nails left thinking about Tuesday)
I particulalrly like the first one (the animal tracks) and “les poules”. My father told this joke, what? 60 years ago I think. He loved that joke…
Merci mon amie…
Glad to have sparked a fond memory of your father Brieuc.
My condolences for your nails. I’m not expecting them to recover any time soon.
My condolences to you and the American people… My Google Trends analysis was not good. The tramp was way above Harris…
But now that it’s happened? Maybe it will push everybody to take a hard look at what went wrong and get a move on…
Merci Brieuc. C’est le seul choix que l’on a.