Howdy hi hello to you, my heroic heartbreakers! Thank you for joining me for another installment of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandilouquents! If you have a particularly witty friend, a habit of watching comedy specials, or you really enjoy this podcast, today’s word might serve as useful to you, for today’s word is: sottisier.

Sottisier is ‘a collection of jokes or stupid comments’. You might say, for example, ‘Enough with that sottisier, Timothy, you must go upstairs and finish your homework!’ It comes from the French word ‘sottise’ meaning ‘stupidity or foolishness’, which in turn comes from the Middle French ‘sot’ meaning ‘imbecile or fool’. If we progress back even further, ‘sot’ comes from the Old French ‘soz’, from Medieval Latin ‘sottus’ meaning ‘foolish’, which is of uncertain origin possibly a Semitic borrowing from Aramaic or Hebrew words meaning trangresor, rebel or drunkard. You can see where this is going.

Some other wonderful French phrases include ‘Ah, la veche!’ meaning ‘oh, my cow!’ which, as an expression of surprise or excitement would be equivalent to ‘oh my God!’, ‘devenir chêvre’ literally meaning ‘to become a goat’, or in other words, ‘to be driven mad’, and ‘tombre dans les pommes’ which literally means ‘to fall in the apples’, or to fall asleep straight away. A personal favourite of mine is ‘Être sur son 31’ which means ‘to be on their 31’ - an expression meaning to put on beautiful or elegant clothes. Movie stars attending the Cannes Film Festival are often said to be ‘on their 31’. You might equate it to one being ‘dressed to the nines’.

Isn’t language wonderful?

Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber

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