The F words are not to be feared

Time now for the next instalment in my series on Quirky Vocabulary – words that I pick at random from my five Romance language dictionaries simply because they are unusual, or sound great. Words that you can have fun with. They might not always be of practical use, and you probably won’t find them in the run-of-the-mill little language guides designed to help you cope for a short stay in a particular place, but who wants to stick to the run-of-the-mill? I like words and idioms that light up the imagination and put something in a slightly different perspective than English does.

Today we are up to the letter F. Normally I start off by looking at the words in English to see if any trends emerge, but I don’t have to do it here because there is a whole blog dedicated to F words in English, The Mighty F. It’s often very funny. The link is here(but, hey, if you are going to wander off to The Mighty F, don’t forget about me, OK? Come back to The Mighty Me at some stage).

I am going to start off in Romanian today because someone else has already done the homework for me, and as far as I am concerned, it’s better when other people work and I don’t. Another blog I follow is Ra – cooking and stuff, by Raveca, a woman from Sibiu – where I did a two-week summer language course in Romanian last year – who is now living in Japan. Her blog has, among other things, “recipes from all over the world that are easy to make, tasty and anyone could try”, including of course some Romanian and Japanese specialties. For those who want to know more about the Romanian language, her blog has the cooking instructions in Romanian and English side by side. She is very deft with her hands too – check out her origami videos. The link is here.

Anyway, on to the F words…

ROMANIAN: In my instalment on the E words, when I began looking ahead to the F words (which have a bad reputation because of ‘that one word‘), Raveca said, never fear, Romanian has many lovely F words, such as frumuseţe and fericire. Well, trust the experts. You can’t go wrong with the favourite words of a native language speaker. Frumuseţe means beauty or splendour, and there is an expression, Ce frumuseţe – What a beauty! … I often hear people say that whenever I walk by, haha. The related adjectives are frumos in the masculine form and frumosă in the feminine – very useful if you want to compliment a Romanian on their looks. My dictionary translates tânăr frumos into English as an Adonis (I was one of those in 1979 or thereabouts). Tânăr means a youth or young man. Fericire means happiness, and the related adjectives fericit and fericită (feminine) are often used when you wish someone a happy something … you should know these words already from my ‘happy new year’, ‘happy Easter’ and ‘happy Christmas’ posts from the past – type “fericit” into the search field at top if you want to do some revision.. Spread the happiness.

PORTUGUESE: I picked the word frente. Not only is it practical, there was an Australian band that named themselves after this word, so its cultural significance has expanded. Frente has many meanings and uses – its dictionary entry is quite lengthy – but basically it means the front, frontal part, face, advanced guard etc, thus is useful when seeking directions. Porta da frente is the front door, banco da frente is a front seat, de trás para frente is backwards and forwards, and para frente means go ahead. In English, when someone is looking for something that is very visible, we say it’s right under your nose, in Portuguese they use ‘in front’ rather than ‘under’ – em frente ao seu nariz. I like this expression too – Saia da minha frente! Get out of my sight!

ITALIAN: This language has a lovely word for handkerchief, (head) scarf or tissue: fazzoletto. And un fazzoletto di terra is the equivalent of a patch of land. Another word that caught my eye was frastornare, to daze, befuddle or bewilder. The adjective frastornato (or –nata in the feminine) means dazed, bewildered and also deafened, as un frastuono is a noise or din.

FRENCH: Well pardon me but when I flipped open my big Oxford Hachette French-English dictionary at a random page in the French F section, the first word that caught my eye on the page was fesser, to spank. It was not a word they taught me at school (although the Jesuits there did lots of spanking). In case you think I have a spanking fetish, let me assure you, I don’t. I was just puzzled that the word is so different from the English one. A fess in English is “a wide horizontal band across the center of a heraldic field”. In French, however, les fesses (feminine, by the way) are the buttocks or more colloquially, the bum or butt. As you can imagine, people being what they are, there are many juicy slang expressions linked to this part of the anatomy. Here is a selection from the Oxford Hachette:

• poser les fesses – to park oneself
• il y a de la fesse ici – there’s some sexy stuff here!
• serrer les fesses – to be scared stiff (serrer means to grip or tighten)
• pousse tes fesses – move over, shove over!
• attention à tes fesses – watch your step
• un coup de pied aux fesses – a kick up the backside
• avoir chaud aux fesses – to have a narrow escape

Other words in the dictionary that caught my eye were farfouiller, to rummage about in, and, ahem, farter, to wax (your skis etc).

SPANISH: Well, I quite liked fastidiarse, which means to put up with or to grin and bear it, mainly because of the expressions that go with it. No fastidies! – for example – can mean You’re kidding!. And que se fastidie can be translated as that’s his tough luck, or as we sometimes say in English, he can lump it. Fastidiarse is related to the verb fastidiar, to annoy, bother, sicken, disgust.

You can find my listings for A-E words under the Quirky vocabulary tab near the top of the page.