Well, accurately throwing a perfectly good cudgel can be pretty awkward and difficult to accomplish. Seems to me the baguette more resembles a javelin.
Good point! After 12 hours an excellent baguette isn't as good, after 24 it's chewy and after 48 as you said it doubles as a well balanced cudgel (new word of the day for me, yay!).
Hi! Sacrebleu is a deformation of sacredieu which itself is short for "par le sacre de dieu". One could translate it as "by the blessing of god" or "by the crowning of god". So, sacredieu! But when you don't want to be seen as a blasphemator, you say "bleu" (blue) for "dieu" (god). Hence sacrebleu, and palsambleu too (derived from "par le sang de dieu" which means "by the blood of god").
We don't use it a lot nowadays but it seems to stick with our image in other countries.
So, I'm good friends with a couple of folks from Vance, France (small town near Nice) and asked them this same question. Their answer: Sacré bleu! means...Sacré bleu!.
Disturbing, I know. Its apparently just an expression of astonishment that they don't actually use very often if at all.
Sacré bleu literally translates to Sacred Blue which goes, allegedly, back to an old swear word associating blue with Mary, the mother of Jesus but may have origins predating that. Note: I didn't get this part from them. I got this from an internet google search later.
All I know beyond that is when I said it, in an overly excited cartoon style, they thought it was hilarious.
Well, I was a C student in 8th grade French so you'll have to forgive me on that one.
Either way the root of the word is basically 'sacred blue' (I always thought...correct me if I'm wrong please!) which is nonsensical to most and probably why my friends told me it really wasn't translatable to English and not something either one even heard outside of the same place I heard it...Tom and Jerry.
Well, I was a C student in 8th grade French so you'll have to forgive me on that one.
Of course I do :-D
Either way the root of the word is basically 'sacred blue' (I always thought...correct me if I'm wrong please!) which is nonsensical to most and probably why my friends told me it really wasn't translatable to English and not something either one even heard outside of the same place I heard it...Tom and Jerry.
Yes, it has gone out of use for a looong time (it sounds like something you could have said in the XVIIIth century for example). As far as the etymology goes, you're almost right but there is another sense, sacrer (verb) is our word for blessing/crowning a king. I'll just paste my other comment here (forgive my laziness).
Hi! Sacrebleu is a deformation of sacredieu which itself is short for "par le sacre de dieu". One could translate it as "by the blessing of god" or "by the crowning of god". So, sacredieu! But when you don't want to be seen as a blasphemator, you say "bleu" (blue) for "dieu" (god). Hence sacrebleu, and palsambleu too (derived from "par le sang de dieu" which means "by the blood of god").
We don't use it a lot nowadays but it seems to stick with our image in other countries.
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u/Kim_Jong_Unchained Jul 21 '14 edited Jul 21 '14
French Intensifies
Edit: Read your requests. I present to you Frenchman 2.0