Pedants' Paradise

**french frank** · 21-09-15, 09:33

Originally posted by jean View Post

Sens de la queue helpfully translated Meaning of the queue.

**Serial_Apologist** · 21-09-15, 13:18

Originally posted by french frank View Post

Isn't there a Dali painting title, something like "Desir attrape par la queue", presumably meaning customer's payment held-up in Ikea?

**vinteuil** · 21-09-15, 13:24

Originally posted by jean View Post

Yes!

Here's something from the café at Nice airport: Sens de la queue helpfully translated Meaning of the queue.

... perhaps just as well they didn't try to translate 'queue'...

Gender Transgressions

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XtiHc_-KdOUC&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=queue+french+penis&source=bl&ots=1Se4RMyJAR&sig=RAno22JBLFD4K6zv1NPtLi9uVcw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDMQ6AEwA2oVChMImJGDr5yIyAIVx9YaCh3OTgHL#v=onepage&q=queue%20french%20penis&f=false

This collection, comprising nine critical essays from prominent and emerging medievalists, seeks to explore the different ways in which French authors of the Middle Ages transgress normative social and cultural gender codes in their literary works Offering fresh approaches to texts that have long been subjected to polarized critical analyses, the essays challenge traditional interpretations of gender roles in Old French literature, especially in the thematic areas of sexual deviation and transgression. This corpus emerges as possessing multiple shades and subtleties of meaning, long buried or ignored by conventional approaches to these texts. This is a conclusion much more in accord with what we know about the ability of the medieval imagination to grasp multiple meaning from a single word or act. The collection provides many examples of this multi-layering of transgressive meaning. Through the detailed studies of gender transgressions such as incest, cross-dressing, rape and homoeroticism, the reader will come to understand the many facets of the literary expression of sexuality in selected Old French texts, products of a society that was at least as diverse and complex as our own. These studies will be of particular value to those interested in Old French and gender studies by dint of accessible analyses of texts both familiar and arcane. The provocative subject matter makes the studies original and eminently readable.

**ferneyhoughgeliebte** · 21-09-15, 13:34

Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post

Isn't there a Dali painting title, something like "Desir attrape par la queue", presumably meaning customer's payment held-up in Ikea?

A Picasso play, no less!

Desire Caught by the Tail - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_Caught_by_the_Tail

**ferneyhoughgeliebte** · 21-09-15, 13:35

Originally posted by vinteuil View Post

... perhaps just as well they didn't try to translate 'queue'...

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...0penis&f=false

!!!

... mightier than the sword?

**Beef Oven!** · 24-10-15, 18:14

I never get this....... "because he had himself "

As in......

"The jury was not told that a fourth suspected killer, Wojciech Ryniak, was not in the dock because he had himself been murdered during another robbery in Oxfordshire earlier this year."

Milton Papadopoulos killing: Gang jailed for millionaire's death

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-34616077

Three men are jailed for killing a millionaire for his Rolex watch.

**ahinton** · 24-10-15, 18:19

Originally posted by Beef Oven! View Post

I never get this....... "because he had himself "

As in......

"The jury was not told that a fourth suspected killer, Wojciech Ryniak, was not in the dock because he had himself been murdered during another robbery in Oxfordshire earlier this year."

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-b...herts-34616077

I don't see much of a problem with that except that "he himself had" would undoubtedly be clearer.

**ahinton** · 24-10-15, 18:26

Originally posted by ferneyhoughgeliebte View Post

!!!

... mightier than the sword?

Nice one! - though I'd not fully apprecaied the nature of your bedtime reading until now! But what a typically academic-sounding post-modernist-generator-inspired title Gender Transgressions: Crossing the Normative Barrier in Old French Literature is, with its inevitable and perceivedly indispensable colon that I find to be just one of so many examples of what I call "colonic irritation"! That said, I'll probaly be unable not to remember this the next time I hear "you are position 1 in the queue" when holding on the phone...

**jean** · 24-10-15, 22:04

Originally posted by ahinton View Post

I don't see much of a problem with that except that "he himself had" would undoubtedly be clearer.

I don't think either is at all unclear. It's not as if the reporter had written he had had himself murdrered.

The two main functions of these -self pronouns are reflexive, and emphatic.

**Pabmusic** · 24-10-15, 23:00

Originally posted by ahinton View Post

I don't see much of a problem with that except that "he himself had" would undoubtedly be clearer.

Quite agree. 'Himself' qualifies 'he' and is there for emphasis, to reinforce 'he', so it would be better next to 'he'.

**gurnemanz** · 25-10-15, 10:55

Originally posted by Pabmusic View Post

Quite agree. 'Himself' qualifies 'he' and is there for emphasis, to reinforce 'he', so it would be better next to 'he'.

The original quote is OK, as others have said, because it used to reinforce a noun or pronoun. Confusion often seems to occur when someone doesn't realise that as a pronoun in its own right it is used not as as a reinforcer but reflexively, ie to refer back to the subject of the sentence, either as the object (he hurt himself) or after a preposition (she works for herself). It can't be used for emphasis as in something like: You can give it to myself, or even more tiresomely as the subject: My colleague and myself will attend the meeting.

**gurnemanz** · 25-10-15, 13:08

Coincidentally, a PS to above: Just listened to poet, Owen Sheers, on Private Passions, referring to "how myself and my wife met".

**french frank** · 25-10-15, 13:45

Originally posted by gurnemanz View Post

Coincidentally, a PS to above: Just listened to poet, Owen Sheers, on Private Passions, referring to "how myself and my wife met".

Where's that 'Doh!' emoticon …

**Pulcinella** · 25-10-15, 13:53

Originally posted by gurnemanz View Post

Coincidentally, a PS to above: Just listened to poet, Owen Sheers, on Private Passions, referring to "how myself and my wife met".

Sadly, some people seem to use such expressions as they think they avoid the I/me dilemma (not that it is a dilemma!).

**french frank** · 25-10-15, 14:06

Originally posted by Pulcinella View Post

Sadly, some people seem to use such expressions as they think they avoid the I/me dilemma (not that it is a dilemma!).

Generational? I would automatically have used the form 'How my wife and I met'. The younger set would go towards 'me and my wife'. Why on earth anyone feels it necessary to resort to 'myself and my wife' I don't know. No necessity to emphasise that it wasn't anyone else [unspecified] meeting my wife. (A future employer? A next door neighbour? The local yoga teacher?)

Pedants' Paradise

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment