How To Swear In French Feat. Paul Taylor | Our Favourite Words

Tutorial Transcript

If you come here and you use zut alors or sacre bleu you'll get a baguette to the face, they'll just beat you with it. Hey! We're doing a video about swearing it says it in the title! Yeah you knew what you were getting yourselves into! - Salut Youtube! - Hello! I'm here with Mr. Paul Fucking Taylor. Hello! I guess I should say bonjour dickheads, I don't know, that's what I say on my youtube channel, whatever, hello, hi, I'm not on my channel today so I'm gonna be nice. - No we're not gonna be nice, that's the point! - If you don't know me then hi my name is Paul I'm English I've been in France for nine years and I grew up in France a little bit when I was a kid I spent five years here I moved over here and I do stand-up comedy. Basically a TV channel in France called Canal got in touch, we made a show called What The Fuck France where basically as an English person I'm complaining about France and everything that happens here and that ended up on YouTube as well so that's cool. I do a lot of swearing in my videos because I'm an angry man in general. Rosie invited me she's like oh you know if we're gonna talk about French swearing in a video we might as well bring you along since you swear a lot in English and in French. - I couldn't think of anyone better to do this video with. - That's why I'm here! The reason we're here to do this video today is to get filthy with the French language because the phrase 'Pardon my French' must have come from somewhere right? - oh yeah, it's true, I'd never thought about that. We're not gonna do insults today we don't want you hurting people with these words. - there's a difference between insulting people vs. random swear words that you can just slot into conversation. Because whether you like it or not whether you're gonna use them or not swearing is just part of any language part of the culture and it's it's good to kind of know when and how to use them otherwise you could come across looking like a fool. - or it's just also good to know them so that when you hear them you go okay that's what's happening, just good to understand because French people swear a lot. So on Swear-O-Meter level zero so things that you could say easily in front of your boss your in-laws you know absolutely no offense whatsoever. The first one is Mince is it's kind of like saying shoot instead of shit Zut I've never heard well I've heard Zut a couple of times but classic foreign thing when when you ask anyone to imitate French person they go 'zut alors' and no one's ever said that history of France. - And on that note, Sacre Bleu is not a thing I know if you come here and you use zut alors or sacre bleu you'll get a baguette to the face they'll just beat you with it. - And then another nice alternative which is quite cute is purée Yeah that's cute. Again it's a shortened down version of Putain which we'll talk about later. Is there a shortened down like a less rude way of saying fuck in in English? Fiddle maybe? Oh fiddle! My mum's Irish and she just says Frig or Feck. - Moving up a little bit, not much, to Swear-O-Meter level one we can start saying the things where you're like Mon Dieu, my god, La Vache, the cow, oh the cow! A nice way to say I'm annoyed, I'm a bit pissed, is ça m'énerve and then the next level ça me saoule, like it makes me drunk. Yeah ça me saoule it makes me drunk. At Swear-O-Meter level 3 we have the iconic merde - shit - it's complicated for foreigners cos there's the R you know so like if my mum whose Irish is saying it she's like Murde sounds a bit like a cow. What I don't understand is how everyone doesn't have throat cancer here, one because they smoke so much and two, the language is so throaty. I would say it's pretty pedestrian wouldn't you? - Yeah used all the time. Even in the workplace, maybe not in front of your boss' boss but in general you could be like merde I'm running late and this kind of thing, totally fine. And if you wanna go up to the next level you can say Mer-Duh so you're really like we pronounce it so that it brings the extra emphasis. - Yeah I hear that a lot when driving in Paris where if somebody cuts you off you just hear people just go Oh Mer-Duh. Yeah basically with these words, the higher up the swearing, the closer to Paris you get. Basically if you're level zero you're in Corsica where everyone's chill, you're on the beach and everything's fine, there's no reason to be angry. Closer you get to Paris the closer you're gonna get annoyed. So another word that's very useful in French that you'll hear all the time is the word Putain which literally means prostitute. Oh, prostitute! - No, not you! What did the prostitutes do that merited that? But it's a cool word in the sense that it's kind of used similarly to the word fuck in English where you can just conjugate it and you can make weird things and different intonations mean different things you know if you're angry if something doesn't work like I don't know if you've got a problem with your phone you just like putain or if somebody tells you hey you know what I'm getting married in 2 weeks - oh putain! Wow that's cool. - Can be a source of joy or surprise as well You bump into someone you haven't seen in a while and you're like oh putain. It be sad as well you know if somebody announces to you that their dog died or something like putain So it's really versatile. It is, it's just so flexible, that's the great thing about putain. It's so flexible like prostitutes apparently. On the same Swear-O-Meter level 4 we've got Bordel, which, again, it means brothel. - Yeah bordel is similar to putain you've got a problem with your phone - oh bordel! It's almost exclusively negative though like when Putain can be a source of joy with Bordel you're usually like it's not true, bordel! - It can't be good news you know if you're getting married tomorrow and people like 'Putain, that's cool!' you can't be like 'Bordel, that's cool!' it doesn't work! It's interesting because in French French you've got putain and bordel which are related to prostitution where like Quebec French what's really interesting is that all the swear words are to do with the church so like the worst ever swearing in French in Quebec you would say Osti de câlice de tabarnak which means the host of the chalice of the tabernacle. Quebec had a revolution against the Catholic Church and so all the swear words are around the church and in France apparently they had a revolution against prostitutes! Moving on to Swear-O-Meter level-five - ça me fait chier - it makes me shit. So that's not nice! - I talk about it in my stand-up show about how angry did French people get at some stage that they needed to take a shit and that something physically made them shit that they were so angry that they needed to shit. - But you can use it like for example if you get invited out and you don't really feel like going you can be like ça me fait chier d'y aller - I don't really feel like going all the way to quite an angry ça me fait chier!! And if you say je me fais chier I make myself shit, you wouldn't guess it but it means that you're bored. You're so bored that you need to shit. - Moving on up to another area of the body so we've moved from the ass to the balls. - So there's a couple of options with the balls in France. The word on its own of balls like bollocks in English is couilles which is another very difficult word for foreigners to pronounce in French so there's a bunch of combinations you can be like ça me casse les couiles - it breaks my balls. Also like women say that as well Exactly, in the interests of female rights. You can't say ça me casse les ovaires - it's breaking my ovaries it doesn't work but breaking balls yeah apparently works. And this level reminds me of j'en ai rien à foutre, I don't give a fuck. Literally I've got no cum to give like no sperm to give you I'm sorry, nothing, dry! Swear-O-Meter level 7 we've got the combos, so this is where you can level up! It's like a video game - you level up if you combine stuff. Putain, five points, Merde, six points but Putain de Merde - twenty points!! Exactly! So, they often start with Putain, you've got: Yeah if you're in a standard office job you might say putain on its own you might say merde on its own, but putain de merde, you're boss might be like excuse me, come to my office, we need to speak about your language. Another combo but I've put it into a new category on its own so level 8 because it involves race, which is never ideal. I've heard putain de sa race so basically fucking disgrace to his race It's very harsh. But my colleague was saying that it's actually her boyfriends favourite word when he's doing his taxes here in France he's self-employed and you know it can get a bit messy and he's going around the house like putain de sa race so it can be used in this context as well. OK so moving on to Swear-O-Meter level nine because no one likes having their mother bought into anything. Mothers are precious. Mothers are always the limit of the thing. Yeah so I was trying to figure out if there is equivalent to motherfucker and the closest that I got if you're just swearing on your own, like frustrated, something happened to you putain de sa mère or nique sa mère. If you're angry you can also just say sa mère. Putain, sa mère, fais chier. When I said nique sa mère to my French colleague she was whoa, like that's pretty hardcore. What's interesting in English specifically in American English motherfucker can be an endearing term and in Commonwealth English the word cunt can be endearing like ah you silly cunt whereas in America that's really hardcore and oppositely in American English the word motherfucker you can be like ah you silly motherfucker it can be a term of endearment whereas British English motherfucker is kind of like whoa it's a little bit more harsh than it is in America. But there's no way sa mère translates into an endearing term. This is it! The ultimate level. Swear-O-Meter level 10! This is where you just take everything that we've told you already all the words that you've you've heard before and you make ultimate combos with them. And so you can use connecting words like mais (but) and vraiment (really) and tellement (so much) to create these sentences of just swearing. It's basically like creating your own little french rap song really putting it all together - remix. You're filling out french paperwork... Putain de bordel de merde so Whore of the Brothel of Shit. Basically translated to fuck fuck fuck fuck. You can always throw in an Enculer in there as well which is sometimes like some of the French words to me don't sound harsh enough you know sometimes you just want to if you say Enculer people are like whoaaaa what just happened there? It literally means to fuck in the ass basically so that's like the worst insult that you can have but you can add that in there and you're like whoa what happened there?! Somebody jumped in line at the boulangerie (bakery), that's what happened! I hope that you guys enjoyed that video! Let us know other swear words that you've heard in French another maybe french-speaking countries in Quebec or Belgium or Luxembourg if you've got dialects there and write some comments below. - Or what's your favourite swearword in your own language? Let's make this the filthiest comment section on YouTube yeah my favourite one in any language is Spanish, the Spanish say Me cago en la leche which literally means I shit in the milk, very specific that they shit in the milk. Cool until the next time I see you guys, à bientôt! Bisous, bye!