Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Miss Poubelle thought that she could read French reasonably well -- an occasional resort to a dictionary was needed, but she got the gist of what was being said. That was the case till her internet wanderings led her to a French website Teubcrade.over-blog.com, dedicated to stinky and dirty men and their funky, unwashed body parts. The French on the blog is far from any version of the language she had ever been exposed to, and full of French slang, especially a funny kind called verlan.

Verlan is a language game that is a bit like Pig Latin in English. The most basic rule is to remove the first syllable of the regular word and put it at the end. So the word branché means something like "cool, trendy, stylish" and its verlan equivalent is chébran. Fumer is the verb "to smoke" and the verlan is méfu.

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If the word only has one syllable, then you take the last consonant and put it at the front, usually with the vowel e or eu after it. So louche means approximately "weird," and its verlan form is chelou. (Remember that the e at the end of most French words is silent, so louche ends with a sound like English sh.) Here the rules seem to have an uncertain result -- sometimes the verlan version of a one-syllable word has two syllables, like chelou. However, in other cases, the verlan reduces this result to one syllable by dropping the last vowel -- the verlan for "sister" is reus (from regular soeur), and not reusoue, or such.

So to return to the funky French men, deciphering this page posed a special challenge since lots of words found here aren't in a dictionary, and Blanche had to make a lot of guesses based on context. The first puzzle was the name of the blog itself, Teub crade. A bit of searching revealed that teub is verlan for bite ("dick") and crade is non-verlan slang for "dirty."

One fellow on this blog wrote in to describe a sexual encounter with a young North African man named Morad:

...lui le rebeu avec son look caillera, brun, la peau mate et le crâne ras et oim le cefran sportif au même look..

Blanche's best translation is:

"...him, a North African with his thuggish look, his dark skin and shaved head, and me an athletic Frenchman with the same look..."

There are four verlan words in here -- rebeu is double verlan (applying the verlan rules twice to the same word). The original French word is arab, turned into beur in the first stage, and then inverted again to give rebeu. Caillera is verlan for racaille, which is something like "street thugs / hoodlums" (a term made famous in 2005 by French president Sarkozy who said that those rioting in Paris were racaille who should be blasted off the street with a power hose). Oim is moi ("me") and cefran is Français.

Not all of the French slang is verlan, however. Youth slang is also heavy on Arabic borrowings and shortened forms of regular French words. Another part of the blog describes the author as kiffant la sturb, les plans uro, ieps, odeurs de zob et d'aisselles. This means, roughly, "likes jacking off, piss scenes, feet, and dick and armpit smells," but only ieps ("feet") is created through verlan-style inversion (from the French word pieds). Two of the words here are borrowed from Arabic -- zob ("dick") and kiffer ("to like"). Other words, such as sturb ("jacking off"), are shortened forms of ordinary French words like masturbation.

The blog goes on to describe numerous filthy encounters between dirty, horny, sweaty Frenchmen in a way that Blanche finds amazing for its linguistic invention and for the range of sexual acts she had scarcely imagined.

One might reasonably ask why the blog is written in such impenetrable French slang, rather than in ordinary language. Something interesting is going on here. The teubcrade blog reminds Blanche of a dark club, known to only a few, where entry requires a special (linguistic) membership card.

As in many languages, slang can serve as a door that admits some people and excludes others. Disaffected young people in France or in other countries feel rejected by the mainstream and construct an alternate world of their own, where the ability to use and understand a special kind of language is a powerful marker of belonging. Those who get it are cool and part of the in crowd, and the young and cool are sexy in every country, so their special language is great for a sex blog.

Blanche was pleased to find that even middle-aged anglophones like herself can be admitted to the secret society of dirty Frenchmen -- so long as they don't turn up their noses at their funky bodies or their funky language.