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FRENCH WORD OF THE DAY

Word of the day: Brader

If you live in Lille, you're probably already familiar with this one.

Word of the day: Brader
Annie Spratt/Unsplash/Nicolas Raymond

Why do I need to know brader?

It’s a useful addition to your vocabulary, particularly if you’re a fan of Leboncoin.

What does it mean?

Brader means to sell off, to get rid of something by selling it at a low price.

The noun for brader is braderie, which can be translated as flea market, jumble sale or car boot sale, but can also be used when a shop is clearing its stock. For example, une braderie de vieilles voitures means a clearance sale of old cars.

A famous braderie is the Braderie de Lille, one of Europe’s biggest flea market and the northern French city’s biggest annual event.

And if you’re on Lebeoncoin, France’s answer to Craigslist, you will come across it frequently.

Use it like this

J’ai bradé ma vielle voiture, elle m’encombrait – I sold off my old car, it was taking up too much space

Le magasin brade plein de ses articles – The shop is selling off a lot of its items

Synonyms

vendre – to sell

solder – to put on sale, to discount

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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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