Langue et langage

As you know, I enjoy the virtues and vicissitudes of language—any language, I ain’t proud. So this BBC vignette rather appeals to me: linguists sharing their favorite idiomatic expressions from various languages. The ones that don’t quite translate into English.

The Polish one—not my circus, not my monkeys—actually is reasonably transferrable. Lord knows we’ve got a full-bore circus going on, with plenty of monkeys.

(I guess that an expression on our side of the language barrier that might be equivalent is the somewhat wordier “Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” Usually said just before one packs up for the day and leaves.)

The one here I particularly like is the Chinese phrase about the grass mud horse. That’s because it’s a homonym of the Chinese equivalent of “yo mama”. This syllabic slitheriness reminds me of a slightly roundabout play on words that starts with the French “ouate de phoque”—a homophone for the English whiskey-tango-foxtrot? (Which in French is actually translated to “c’est quoi ce bordel?”)

Only the actual English translation of ouate de phoque is “seal wadding”.

I learned this from a multilingual Facebook friend. Occasionally when he posts something that strikes me as beyond the beyond, I’ll comment “Seal wadding!”, and he has to explain it to others.

Well, perhaps it doesn’t sound as amusing to you as it does to me. Because you just can’t make this stuff up. Unless you’re a linguist, I suppose.