I recently rewatched La Haine for the first time since it came out almost thirty years ago, and it was just as good as I remembered. But this time I noticed something that must have zipped right past me back then: at one point Saïd says “Tes parents, ils habitent Rue Gama !” It turns out this is not an actual street but a reference to an ad campaign for Gama detergent; here’s a 1980 example. Why Gama is called that I do not know.
It reminds me of the Fry and Laurie Treaty of Westphalia skit, which culminates in the laugh line “you are really spoiling us” — to get the joke you have to be familiar with the Ferrero Rocher ad campaign.
“Le groupe Colgate-Palmolive avait lancé Gama en 1974 et misé en 1978 sur une campagne de pub sur le thème de “lessive poids lourd” (à voir ICI). On se souvient tous que Coluche s’était d’ailleurs moqué de cette pub dans un de ces sketchs : “Gama, la lessive poids lourd… pour laver les camions !”.”
https://lescopainsd-abord.over-blog.com/2015/02/rue-gama-par-nath-didile.html
Poids lourd is heavyweight (like a boxer), but it also refers to a heavy goods vehicle (i.e. large tractor trailer).
I don’t know why CP chose it, although it would have been easy to pronounce across many European languages.
Yes, it’s a well-chosen name, short, distinctive, and (as you say) easy to pronounce.
The present licensee markets the Procter & Gamble “Tide” product under the name “Gama” in various (European?) countries. For the name “Gama” I can only put forward a guess, based on the “Tide” logo with colours arranged circularly, used also for Gama, that the name is from Spanish (or Portugese?), see
https://dle.rae.es/gama
1. f. Escala, gradación de colores.
The name may have another meaning, e.g., García-Marquez from two hypothetical businessmen.
Maybe also “Gam” from “Gamble”?
I was not aware of the number mismatch “On se souvient tous”, or that French, like Spanish if I’m not mistaken, makes words of English origin plural by adding -s even when English does it some other way, e.g. “sketchs”.
Sandwichs turn up pretty often on sale in France, too.
The trick is that the French -s is silent.
As in les niouzes.
Les Niouzes was a tv show in 1995 that lasted only one month.
“Gamut” is, of course, a very familiar word to those of us who use digital colour devices with their different “colour spaces” (cameras, screens, and printers especially). “Out of gamut” is the curse of conversion from RGB (red, green, blue) to CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black).
French plural -s is just like those three strokes you write after a word in Egyptian hieroglyphs to show that it’s plural. A determinative rather than phonetic element.
For what it’s worth, at least one French person has decided it was just a version of “gamma”, which could overlap with the spanish/portuguese “gama” and the “gamut” theories above:
“Gama (lessive) : G – 3ème lettre de
l’alphabet grec”
https://www.arretetonchar.fr/wp-content/uploads/2013/IMG/archives/+++ListeProduits+etymologie+++.pdf
Interesting, thanks!
Here is the original 1949 song ‘À Paris’ by Francis Lamarque, which was a hit in 1953 for Yves Montand (as here).