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FRENCH WORD OF THE DAY

French word of the day: Chauve-souris

It's got nothing to do with baldness.

French word of the day: Chauve-souris
Photo: Annie Spratt/Unsplash/Nicolas Raymond

Why do I need to know chauve-souris?

They're scary, or cute, depending on your point of view. Find them in Transylvanian castles, Gotham City or, more likely, on an evening stroll through the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris. There's 34 species of them in France…

What does it mean?

You've probably guessed it, chauve-souris means 'bat'.

When you break it down though, what you're saying literally means bald (chauve) mouse (souris).

Bald mice might sound like an odd name for bats, but there may be a reason behind it. The theory goes that bats were originally referred to in Latin as 'owl mice', which makes more sense given their nocturnal lifestyle. However at some point the Latin word for owl (cavannus) got mixed up with the world for bald (calvus) and that distortion made its way into the French we speak today.

Synonyms

The fancy, technical name for chauve-souris is chiroptera, but that's used mainly in a scientific context.

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FRENCH WORD OF THE DAY

French Expression of the Day: Caillou dans la chaussure

This one might come in handy when you’re complaining about French bureaucracy.

French Expression of the Day: Caillou dans la chaussure

Why do I need to know Caillou dans la chaussure?

Because, sometimes, you just need to tell someone about your frustration with life’s little, annoying, metaphorically painful niggles.

What does it mean?

Caillou dans la chaussure – roughly pronounced kay-oo don la shass-your – translates as ‘stone in the shoe’, is a phrase as old as time, and means exactly what it says.

You can use this in a literal sense, for example if you’re hiking and get gravel in your boots, but it’s more usually used as a metaphor.

When someone says they have a pebble in their shoe, it means that something is not right – and it describes the metaphorical feeling of something troublesome that is more painful than it really needs to be and is creating bigger problems than its size would suggest.

You can use it about your own problems, and it’s also used to describe something that is a big problem for someone else – in English you might say something is the ‘millstone around their neck’ to describe a big, weighty problem that won’t go away.

Use it like this

Nouvelle-Calédonie : le gros caillou dans la chaussure de Macron – New Caledonia is the millstone around Macron’s neck

Nous connaissons tous cette sensation désagréable d’avoir un caillou coincé dans notre chaussure – We all know that unpleasant feeling of having a stone stuck in our shoe.

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