Jeremy Osner’s Facebook post features a French ad for the new Barbie movie with the tagline “Elle peut tout faire. Lui, c’est juste Ken.” [She can do everything. Him, he’s just Ken.] But I was staggered by Jeremy’s comment:
“Lui, c’est juste Ken” means “as for him, he’s just Ken”. HOWEVER: “Lui, sait juste ken” means “as for him, he only knows how to fuck”
“Shurely shome mishtake,” thought I to myself, but a quick Google produced the page 17 French words that young people use the most, and shure enough, there was the entry:
Ken, it means “to have sex” (to screw). And it’s also verlan. It’s verlan for “n*quer” which has the same meaning.
OK, I can see the derivation from niquer, which I was aware of, but how can you have a French verb, even a slang one, with no endings?
Some other items in that list of “words that young people use the most”: gow ‘girlfriend/lover,’ askip ‘it seems’ (abbreviation of à ce qu’il paraît), en soumsoum ‘in a hidden way, discreetly,’ balec ‘I don’t give a damn’ (from je m’en bats les couilles), and dead ça ‘killed it, nailed it’ (Grâce à toi, on a gagné ! T’as dead ça !). I used to think I had at least a passive awareness of French slang; now I feel utterly out of it.
there was a fairly in depth thread about this on the French reddit sub that other day:
https://www.reddit.com/r/French/comments/14be6ji/why_is_this_french_version_of_barbie_poster_funny/
In one of the trailers for the movie, Ken asks Barbie if she wants to do a sleepover, and Barbie says yes, but what will we do? And Ken looks wide-eyed and says, I don’t know!
The French version must be a little more worldly…
Askip i’n’sait même ken!
Sly movie taglines are a thing. The new Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret movie had the tagline
IT’S FINALLY THAT TIME
04.28.23
ONLY IN THEATERS
n*quer
Says Wiktionary:
“Inherited from Proto-Semitic *nayak-, outside of Arabia only attested by Akkadian 𒈾𒀀𒆪 (nâku).”
Sure this asterisk metathesis is French jargon too!
(of course it says this in the arabic entry. The french word is from lingua franca/Sabir from Arabic, TLF thinks)
https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/ken says “Ne se trouve qu’à la forme infinitive ou comme participe passé” and, relatedly, etymology “De niquer. apocope de kéni ou quéni.”
asterisk … attested by Akkadian
Perhaps the asterisk is a DINGIR sumerogram.
No, it means that the “quer” is a reconstructed protoform.
You’re in good company. I don’t know anything more recent than vachement and la flotte…
That, though? Ne is thoroughly dead.
So what’s left ? Just pas ?
Yup.
Or even que alone meaning “only”. C’est que ça qui reste !
So it should be just “Askip sait même ken” then.
Sounds like some sort of Creole French.
Either que “only” or même pas “not even”.
So can you actually completely drop the 3rd person pronoun (or at least ‘il’) in certain colloquial registers now??*
I know that ‘il’ is normally reduced, but the resulting ‘i’ is still written.
Tangentially, while I was trying to look up the above question, I discovered ‘mouais’ (presumably ‘hmm..ouais’) for a weak or uncertain affirmation. Is this also a very new thing? I thought my colloquial French was only 50 years out of date, but after 5 minutes of googling stuff it might be more like 100…
*I am aware that this is possible with some impersonal verbs: il faut > faut
I thought my colloquial French was only 50 years out of date, but after 5 minutes of googling stuff it might be more like 100…
I am in the same leaky boat with you.
Alas, some things must always remain beyond our ken…
Alas, some things must always remain beyond our ken…
It comes with age. Or rather it no longer comes, if ye ken my meaning.
Nous sommes les enculés de l’histoire. [Copi]
Not that I was aware of… but… apparently in the last 20 years… faut pas rêver, quoi.
I ken even.
> “Lui, c’est juste Ken” means “as for him, he’s just Ken”. HOWEVER: “Lui, sait juste ken” means “as for him, he only knows how to fuck”
I didn’t do any c’est/sait gymnastics; I simply read it as “he’s just for fucking (to fuck)”.
> how can you have a French verb, even a slang one, with no endings?
Speaking as someone who’s had to learn dozens of completely made up endings in French only to learn they’re all pronounced exactly the same… how can you not? 🙂
Incidentally and possibly of relevance, verlan or no, kene is Walloon for vulva.
https://dtw.walon.org/index.php?query=kene
Something I’m a bit surprised no one has mentioned:
Older readers may recall one of the biggest hit songs of 1963, ‘Dominique’ by Sœur Sourire, the Singing Nun. The refrain begins “Domi-nique -nique -nique s’en allait tout simplement”. Would the younger generation of native speakers of French find that line hilariously (or perhaps embarrassingly) obscene, especially coming from the chaste lips of a nun? Surely some readers fall into that category and can tell us.
She actually did get niqued over by Philips. Chaste she wasn’t. And the name Soeur Sourire had been pasted on her back, she herself thought it was stupid.
À partir de 1974, les services fiscaux belges réclament à Jeanine Deckers les fortunes qu’auraient dû lui rapporter les ventes de Sœur Sourire, mais restent sourds à ses explications. Jeanine Deckers fait alors appel à son ancien couvent et à son ancienne maison de production, Philips. Si les sœurs lui remettent ce qu’elles estiment être sa part (l’aidant notamment à acquérir son appartement de Wavre, à la condition qu’elle cesse de dénigrer la congrégation et qu’elle signe un document pour solde de tout compte), Philips, qui avait touché 95 % des recettes, ne fait rien.
Sa compagne fonda l’institut Claire Joie qu’elle dirigea avec Jeanine Deckers afin de venir en aide aux enfants autistes. Malheureusement, l’institut fut déclaré en faillite et dut fermer en 1982[8],[9],[10].
Confrontée à une dette importante et aux intérêts accumulés, Jeanine Deckers et sa compagne, Annie Pécher, thérapeute d’enfants autistes, sombrent dans une dépression que l’alcool et les médicaments ne font qu’aggraver. Toutes deux finissent par se suicider ensemble le 29 mars 1985.
She is the tragic Marilyn Monroe of light-hearted Catholic ditties.
Light-hearted Catholic ditties?! If Dominic didn’t actually found the Inquisition, he’s associated with it and certainly wouldn’t have disapproved of it; the ditty includes the line “Dominique notre père, combattit les albigeois,” and I trust you know the Albigensians were not combatted with armloads of flowers. I could have sworn I’d heard a version of the song with a line beginning “Pour flétrir les hérétiques,” but I can’t turn it up online so maybe I confabulated it. Anyway, I never cared for that song, but I’m a Protestant atheist, not a Catholic one.
For a moment I assumed Copi was the logician, resulting in an interesting juxtaposition.
And a late friend of mine refused to sing “Dominique” because of the line about the Albigensians. (In one English singing version it becomes “fighting sin like anything.”)
Likely; but maybe they’d jump right to the metaphorical meaning implied by combattit les Albigeois.
Stereotypical Banlieue thing to say before a football game: On les nique tous ! On nique leur race.
As a young student of French, I knew about various sound changes but not when they happened, so I always thought it should be *Aubigeois.
It totally would be if Albi were far enough north to have become *Aubi.
I suppose that explains Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd. The distance is not great enough for Aldi and Audi – apart from the legal problems.
And don’t forget Chauvin and Calvin.
Fun fact: in German, L-vocalization is a southern thing…
@de
Is al > ai regular in Bavarian, e.g., to take an example with alb Schwalbe > Schwaiberl? This is just one variant, other variants have the l (maybe alb is particularly prone to l-restoration).
I presume you intended @dm rather than @de.
In Central = Danube Bavarian, yes, plus the usual rounding of *a, so you get [ɒɪ̯] or thereabouts. Can sound quite similar to a Standard eu.
Western Oti-Volta has /Vj/ for proto-Oti-Volta *Vɹ. which has always struck me as a rather surprising sound change, but then I’ve never been to New York.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English#Coil%E2%80%93curl_merger
Similar changes actually seems to be fairly common cross-linguistically. Evidently all those approximants sound the same to some people …
In NYC that only used to happen before a central(ized) vowel, not in general.