The official language thread

Captain Haddock :heart:
He can show :ransome: a thing or two about swearing and cursing in an inspired fashion… but the “thousand bombs and grenades” or variations is not really a thing in real life. In neither language.
In French, that catchphrase is "
mille millions de mille sabords de tonnerre de Brest!" ( or some variances). Sabord is the hatch at the side of a ship where the cannon nuzzle goes through. Tonnerre de Brest = thunder of Brest, refers to the cannons firing.

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Duizend bommen en granaten!

@milanfahrnholz
Sapristi is closer to a real French expression, although it’s quite dated. (I’m not really sure about the situation in the '30s.)

Sapristi is pretty weak. It’s like “blimey!”
While Haddock is more in the category of “bloody damn hell!”

He likes to swear a lot, especially at other people.

“Basji-boezoek!” is one of my favourites.

As a child I always wanted to make a Tintin game. Perhaps I should do with AGS.

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Yeah, but part of that is simply it being dated. But I’m pretty sure it’s so dated that everyone says zut instead. :stuck_out_tongue:

Haddock has always been my favourite character for precisly these reasons.

Tintin is pretty damn racist and you single out that part for being dated?

  1. This is the official language thread.
  2. I’m talking about dated in 1934.

Arguably…
Herge never was too fond of the original Tintin en Congo. He revised a lot to make it less “racist” in hindsight but originally it was just reflecting reality. Every few years a new media storm starts on that because someone wants to censor or see a ban on that album for being racist. It’s ridiculous. When the book appeared, Congo was a Belgian colony and white men considered themselves superior to the black men in the colony. The whole first half of the 20th century pop culture is full of similar things. It took the US pop charts a lot longer to get rid of separate “colored” music billboards and R&B or other labels they tried to put on it. Tintin on the other hand has a Chinese friend in early 1930’s (based on a real life friendship of Herge with real life Chang) and in that album he debunks popular myths of Europeans versus Chinese. Tintin always stood up for the weak people regardless of their color when the world did not. So calling him (or the series) racist is cutting a lot of corners, especially when viewed in historical context.
[end of Tintin defence]

Tintin is pretty damn hard on animals though… (blowing up a rhino with TNT because the bullets bounced of its hard skin?)

Oh you mean it was even old when the comics where new? But this being a Haddock I guess he would talk a rather antiquated langauge.

The chinese one has always been my favourite! :slight_smile:

…and The Rory Award for “The Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word ‘Belgium’ In A Serious Screenplay” goes to @Frenzie

Fuck!

(Or is that “Belgium!”?)

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Er, since this is the official language thread, ending sentences with a preposition is frowned upon in English I think to avoid dumb sounding sentences like: “Where is he going to?”
Or “Where is the football at?”

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If you teach people about prepositions instead of avoiding redundancy for stylistic reasons you will end up with nothing but a bunch of zombies claiming there’s something wrong with prepositions.

Ending sentences with prepositions isn’t frowned upon by any expert. Even the awful book by Strunk & White that originated most zombie rules breaks its own evidence-absent rules about things like passives and prepositions constantly.

Of course there is such a thing as situations where you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition for various reasons. The one you mentioned is simply the more general stylistic preference against redundancy. Others are certain noun phrases. “I admired the patience she spoke with” is wrong. But this is an exception to general usage rather than the norm.

Formally speaking you’d often use a formal relative pronoun like which, but even then “for whom is it?” is still plain wrong. “For what did you buy that?” Nope. Just nope.

Somewhere something went wrong and a large contingent of people seems to think the exception with noun phrases is the rule.

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What is the origin of the word neighbourhood then ?
(neighborhood for US) :horse: :pig: :bow_and_arrow: ?

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It’s interesting that you have so many synonyms for that sound a horse makes in English, according to google: neigh, whinny, bray, nicker, snicker, whicker; (archaic) nicher; (rare) hinny
(not counting the few snorting noises…)

We have exactly one for that high pitched hiii-iiih-uuhu sound : hinniken

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Also a Geordie tearm of endearment, usually for females.

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Alreet hinny!

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I hope the grammar police isn’t watching…
Otherwise you should plead “alliterating embellishment”

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:scream: It’s not my fault!! My work browser doesn’t have spellcheck enabled!!

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