We've seen that the Italians are unambiguously against reviving past relationships. What about Spanish, the other big language of romance?

Well...

Donde hubo fuego, cenizas quedan [es], is used specifically to justify getting back with an ex.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean you should tropezar dos veces con la misma piedra [es] (make the same mistake twice [en]).

Also, beware of calientapollas [es] (cockteases [en]) and try not to have to casarse de penalty [es] (shotgun wedding [en]): you don't want your kids to nacer de penalty [es] (be born as the cause and consequence of a shotgun wedding [en]).

Instead you better soler [es] balconear [es]: get in the habit of usually [en] talking at the balcony to your lover [en].

Italian being the language of romance, of course it would have word-concepts to handle specific cases that can arise in this area. Thus, enter the saying la minestra riscaldata non è mai buona [it] apparently, from Venetian dialect, la menestra riscaldada no la é mai bona. A variant that made it all the way up to English speakers, though less known by true Italians, is cavoli riscaldati [it].

It means, a reheated soup is never good [en], that is, you should not try to revive past relationships. You can also use the short form minestra riscaldata [en] to refer to such revived relationships, or express it as a caveat [la] to a friend who would consider such a foolhardy venture.

Of course, for the same reasons, the Italians, God bless them, also gave us the beautiful trombamici [it] (trombamico [it], trombamica [it], trombamici [it], trombamiche [it]), which means, literally fuck friends [en], or, as I'd prefer in English, sex buddies [en].

If you ever go to Italy, you should be able to get along just fine by approaching women with a simple vorresti essere una delle mie trombamiche? [it], would you like to be one of my fuck friends? [en].

They even have the Ten Golden Rules of the Perfect Fuck Friend, and an explanatory table, included, I suppose, in every mid-school sex-ed textbook of Italy (click for hi-res version):

All you need to know is that farlo [it] means do it [en].

I should also mention that the Italian former Prime Minister, Il Cavaliere [it], one of the most powerful men urbis et orbis [la], actually considered renaming his political party to Forza Gnocca [it], which translates as Go Pussy [en].

Silvio il grande [it] (Silvio the Great [en]) is also known for having gotten himself into a scandal for having sex with a minor prostitute, which, quite fittingly, sports [en] the beautiful name of Ruby Rubacuori [it], Ruby the Heartstealer [en].

Of course, he got acquitted for that, yet didn't escape some community service time on "tax fraud" charges. According to leaked videos, though, he still managed to enjoy la dolce vita [it] (or is that il dolce far niente [it]?) even there.

As the French would say: ça ne s'invente pas [fr] – you can't make this shit up [en].

On 2014-10-06 [ISO 8601], the French MP [en] Julien Aubert referred to the President of the French Parliament (Assemblée nationale [fr]) as Madame le président [fr]. The President, whose gender happens to be female, insisted for him to refer to her as Madame la présidente. He refused, and was punished by a docking of pay [en] of a quarter of his monthly indemnité parlementaire [fr]. Previously, he had already committed the same sin by using Madame le Ministre [fr], and not Madame la Ministre, to address a female Minister.

The case is fascinating because he, in effect, got "fined" for applying the correct rules of French grammar, as maintained by the Immortals:

MINISTRE n. m. {XIIe siècle. Emprunté du latin minister, « serviteur ».}

L’emploi du féminin dans La ministre, et dans Madame la Ministre, qui est apparu en 1997, constitue une faute d’accord résultant de la confusion de la personne et de la fonction.

– The Immortals

Thus spake the Immortals. I think it's pretty clear... But remember who rules over French language: they have no legal authority, the French Parliament has.

In 2002 already, the Immortals foresaw that conflict:

L’application ou la libre interprétation de « règles » de féminisation édictées, de façon souvent arbitraire, par certains organismes français ou francophones, a favorisé l’apparition de nombreux barbarismes.

– Féminisation des noms de métiers, fonctions, grades et titres

Barbarisme [fr], yes: a mistake so blatant only a foreigner [en] could commit it (from the greek β α ρ ϐ α ρ ι σ μ ο ̀ ς [el]). And we can presume that by "certains organismes français" [fr], they most certainly meant the French Parliament.

But beyond politics and argumentum ab auctoritate [la] why are the Immortals right?

Because French is a language with grammatical genders [en] and they're unrelated to biological gender of persons. Indeed, the word genre [fr] in French has only that grammatical meaning, and not the biological-male-or-female meaning it has as well in English, which translates as sexe [fr], the same as biological sex [en]. Of course, in English the word also includes "social gender", as in "gender studies", a meaning which neither French word has. Thus, once the "gender studies" crossed the Atlantic, the French witnessed the birth of the anglicism genre, as in "études genre" [fr]. A quite unfortunate turn of events for some, who deride the concept as théorie du Dgendeur [fr], which is the French transcription of the English gender [en]. Usually, the concept is criticized both as an anglicism and, on a deeper level, as being a feminist construct contrary to our genetic programming as either male or female (gender thus being a natural reality, not a social construct), thus neither a valid word nor a valid concept.

Indeed, it's probably no coincidence that feminists try to substitute the social meaning of gender as the only valid one, and in their attempt to do so, try to destroy both the other meanings of the word, that is, the concepts of biological gender and grammatical gender. And therefore, it is no coincidence either that anti-feminists try to defend both the grammatical gender and the natural gender, against the onslaught of social gender.

Anyway, back to grammar. A simple example of grammatical gender is the German Mädchen [de], which is gramatically neuter, although it can designate exclusively biologically female persons. In French, however, grammatical genders are only male or female, not neuter. But like in German, biological and grammatical genders can be unrelated (like for inanimate objects, who can be either gender), or even contrary. Thus, not only are there French masculine words who designate both male and female persons, and feminine words which can designate both male and female persons, but, furthermore, like the German neuter word who designates only females, there are French masculine words which can designate only female persons, and feminine words which can designate only male persons.

A few all-too-quickly forgotten examples will make this a lot clearer:

• personne [fr]: person [en], feminine word which can designate either male or female persons. When you need to talk about a male person, you write cet homme est une personne sympathique [fr].
• thon [fr]: ugly fat woman [en], pejorative word which is masculine but can designate only females. Thus, you write: cette femme est un thon [fr].
• recrue [fr]: recruit [en], especially in the male conscript sense. Since conscription usually only applies to males (of course, that kind of discrimination is much less worrisome than fake grammar issues), it's a feminine word used mostly to designate male persons. (You can't stop "social progress", though: Since the glorious "historic day for equality", Norwegian women are subject to military slavery as well.)
• star [fr]: star [en], an anglicism, and it's feminine. Both males and females will thus write je serai une star [fr] (I will be a star [en]).
• dupe [fr]: to be the dupe [fr] of someone means having been a naïve [fr] person that got tricked by another person. It's masculine, and it can happen to both males and females.
• racaille [fr]: means a group of loathsome people. Recently, the meaning of the word drifted towards loathsome individuals (and not only the group thereof). Is that a synecdoche? Either way, it's feminine, but mostly designates males. When you wish to refer to a female racaille [fr], you usually specify, e.g. [la] fille racaille [fr] (racaille girl).
• mannequin [fr] and top model [fr]: a model, usually female. Both words are masculine, the latter being an anglicism on top of it.
• ange [fr]: masculine word, can designate both males and females. And of course, emphatically, the masculinity of the word does not settle the old question of the gender of angels. (Discuter sur le sexe des anges [fr], to debate the gender of angels, is the French way of saying How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? [en]).

And, we can add last but not least [en], or to wit [en]:

• ministre [fr]: minister [en], masculine word which can designate both male and female politicians, thus you write madame le Ministre [fr].

I wonder, is there even one case of a feminine word having a proposed "masculinization"? Didn't think so.

Therefore, were it not political, those women with nothing better to do would suggest a complete reform of French grammar, in order to make it like English (only more so, since there are exceptions in English), by having a clear separation of neuter for inanimate objects and concepts, feminine for female persons, and masculine for male persons.

Of course, this raises the obvious questions of trangender persons, or hermaphrodites. The next step would then be to avoid gender altogether, and have a gender-free language. That is, a language where grammatical gender doesn't depend on biological sex, since that may be undetermined. Like a language, maybe, where a person's job title doesn't depend on their genitals, that is, they remain "le président" [fr] whether they're male, female, hermaphrodite, or transgender.

Oh, wait.

Unlike English, French is a centralized language. And unlike English again, its aficionados [es] usually have autistic reactions when it comes to integrating words from other languages. The result is a much poorer language, torn between common, natural use, and artifical-constructivist esperanto-like madness imposed by officials, academics and pressure groups. Who's to blame? By increasing order of guilt, j'accuse [fr]...

The Immortals

The French Academy (l’Académie française [fr]) was founded by the Cardinal Richelieu (the bad guy from the Three Musketeers), and they're called the Immortals (like the bad guys from 300). The members have been chosen by cooptation [fr] ever since. Legally, the institution is a Foundation with particular rules, but it doesn't seem to be getting much financing from the French government, and they have no actual legal power

Somehow, though, their job seems to require the purchase of ugly green jackets and extremely over-priced fancy swords. Yes.

Thus, they're pretty harmless old French people. Sometimes they're right, sometimes not. Their main concern, though, appears to be a genuine care for the purity of the language. As a rule of thumb, I'd say: trust their judgment whenever it's about old rules, and ignore it whenever they've had too much pastis [fr] and try to build up new ones.

Of course, they do hate any sort of competition from other languages, especially within France, their fief [fr]:

Despite furious opposition from L'Académie, Article 75 of the revised constitution now states that all the languages "are part of France's heritage". As a result, French tax payers also face a multi-million Euro bill to make everything from road signs to menus into "regionally acceptable" dual-translation form.

– France's L'Académie Française upset by rule to recognise regional tongues

Considering the equivalently babelist [en] (definition upcoming in a future post ici-même [fr]) proposal of subsidizing half-dead dialects by tax-money perfusion [fr], I daresay that we have no dog in this fight [en].

The International Organisation of La Francophonie [en] (sic)

With an 80 million euro budget financed by governments, their aim seems to be the promotion of some vague idea of French speakers helping other French speakers, and associating only with other French speakers. A sort of préférence nationale [fr] applied, ad absurdum [la], abroad? I don't get it.

Their armed branch [en] (or branche armée [fr]) is probably the Club Med. Indeed, it seems the very embodiment of the Francophonie [fr] spirit: that when you travel to a "foreign" [en] (i.e. [la]: non-France) country, your first priority should be to find your fellow Frenchmen, and avoid, at all costs, any sort of association with the local, indigenous [en] population. I've personnally been the unwilling witness of French tourists addressing everyone in French in the middle of Spain, and wondering what paella [es] is and whether it's edible. Your best course of action [en] is to answer in Spanish, whether you speak French or not.

Of course, said behavior raises the obvious question: why then leave the sacred motherland to begin with [en]? Indeed, a person moving (even temporarily) from France to a non-France country would appear as silly as the proverbial Polish emigrant who left a country packed with [en] ponies for a non-pony [en] country.

As I was saying: I don't get it.

The French government

And académiciens are not alone in their attempts to halt the sabotage of the French language: other authorities, with considerably more legal power, are hard at work too. The French government has introduced various pieces of legislation over the past forty years, the most far-reaching being the 1994 Toubon Law which ruled that the French language must be used – although not necessarily exclusively – in a range of everyday contexts. Two years later, the French ministry of culture and communication established the Commission générale de terminologie et de néologie, whose members, supervised by representatives from the Académie, are tasked with creating hundreds of new French words every year (such as resserrement de credit* and poule finale*) to combat the insidious and irresistible onslaught of Anglo-Saxon terminology. French speakers point out that in practice, most of these creations are not well-known and, if they ever leap off the administrative pages of the Journal officiel, rarely survive in the wild. There are, however, a few notable exceptions, such as logiciel and – to an extent – courriel, which have caught on: the English takeover is not quite yet a fait accompli.

– Can the Académie française stop the rise of Anglicisms in French?

This is already more about jacobinisme [fr] (the central power of Paris over France, crushing local dialects and cultures), than about mere linguistic concerns. And of course, it's about an autistic xenophobic inferiority complex of being scared of "foreign" words, substituting new word-concepts from English by new word-concepts made up.

Mais pour éviter que, dans certains domaines, les professionnels ne soient obligés de recourir massivement à l’utilisation de termes étrangers, l’adaptation du vocabulaire doit être encouragée, facilitée et coordonnée. C’est pourquoi, depuis plus de trente ans, les pouvoirs publics incitent à la création, à la diffusion et à l’emploi de termes français nouveaux. Œuvrer à l’élaboration d’une terminologie de référence, conforme aux règles de formation des mots de notre langue, et la mettre à la disposition des professionnels et du public, telles sont les missions du dispositif d’enrichissement de la langue française mis en place par le décret du 3 juillet 1996.

– Commission on French impoverishment

Let me translate that for you: In order to avoid that people who know what they're talking about use relevant and precise words, spontaneously adopted by them and then the general population, we shall use your tax money in order to foster bunches of bureaucrats. Those bureaucrats will create artificial words that, supposedly, "sound" more French. The new words will usually mostly sound uglier rather then "Frenchier", but we don't care about that. The only objective difference that makes them more French is that only the French will use them. Assuming they do. That is, assuming we somehow coerce them into it or pressure them or subsidize it. That is all.

As a French emigrant (or shall I say émigré [fr]) friend wrote:

Mon ami Gavin m'a appris que l'académie française — ou tout autre dépotoir de Picrocholes rances — avait décrété, loi Toubon à l'appui, que dorénavant il ne faudrait plus dire blog, mais bloc-note ou simplement bloc. Ma réponse est: FUCK YOU WITH A RUSTY CHAINSAW, YOU STERILE SENILE TWITS! — et comme ce n'est pas du français, vous n'avez aucune autorité à faire valoir. Toutefois, puisque vous êtes trop microcéphales pour le comprendre si ce n'est pas en français, je vous le redis ainsi: ALLEZ VOUS FAIRE ENCULER, PUTAINS DE PUCERONS FASCISTES DÉCRÉPIS! Les pires sont bien sûr les fientes de pou qui des deux côtés de l'Atlantique font appliquer les diktats nauséabonds des prétendus défanceurs la Lang-fransèze. Contre les commissaires politiques et autres morts-vivants, je recommande la tronçonneuse et le fusil à double canon. Y en a pas beaucoup qui sont capables de me faire jurer sur mon blog. Ils en sont.

– Faré, "Mots de quatre lettres"

Even if you don't read French, don't worry: the essential of his message is in uppercase English.

The Quebec government

Now those are really the guys with issues.

Those are the guys who actually do speak perfect English, yet will go to extreme lengths in order to keep speaking their Museum version of French (which sounds completely gay to the rest of la francophonie [fr]), interspersed with made up words that sound even worse. Those are the guys that could enjoy Men In Black [en] with the original actor's voices and full comprehension, yet will prefer to translate it as Hommes en noir [fr][sic] and watch it in some crap dubbing.

Oh and yes, almost forgot: those are also the guys who pretend to defend the French, while at the same time lacking understanding of its grammatical gender rules, even at the risk of doubting the very recommandations of the Immortals:

It was the Québécois who pioneered the feminization of job titles (with “new” versions such as professeure and ingénieure) in the 1970s.

– Can the Académie française stop the rise of Anglicisms in French?

If you ever move to Canada, I'd say avoid Quebec. Especially if you do speak French.

Concept of the day: pfui Teufel [de].

Variants: pfui Deibel [de], pfui Teuchsel [de]. Teufel [de], Deibel [de] and Teuchsel [de] all are synonyms for devil [en]:

From Old High German tiufal, ultimately from Latin diabolus, from Ancient Greek διάβολος (diábolos).

– Teufel

Translation in English:

ugh, yuck! expression of dislike or repugnance

– pfui Deibel

Pfui [de] became phooey [en]:

expression of contempt, 1929, from Yiddish, from German pfui (attested in English from 1866); popularized by Walter Winchell. Phoo "vocalic gesture expressing contemptuous rejection" is recorded from 1640s.

– phooey

In [cs], it is used "as is", both pfui [de] which becomes fuj [cs], and the full expression:

fuj citosl. vyjadřující odpor, ošklivost, opovržení, leknutí. Fuj, styďte se! Olb. Fuj na ouřady. Šlej. Fuj do toho života, fuj do té rozkoše. Kronb. Vulg. fuj tajfl — to jsem se lekla! Herrm. Též fuj tajbl, fuj tajxl.

– fuj

Except for the spelling:

Best said while spitting, or at least making the spitting gesture:

“Pfui” (alternate spellings) is also a mild version of spitting. We all know how the expression is used, but probably not that it is also based on the same superstition to ward off evil. With the expression of disbelief, disdain, consternation at someone’s remark, we reject it, perhaps to subconsciously indicate that they are words we wouldn’t take in our own mouth, spitting them out. Unknowingly however, we are warding off the evil we infer in the remark.

The expression “pfui” comes from Yiddish/German. The stronger German expression, “Pfui Teufel! (devil)” makes clear the connection to the superstition about spitting, as do those who repeat “pfui” three times for emphasis.

– Why should one spit?