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FRENCH WORD OF THE DAY

French word of the day: People

Did you know that this word means something slightly different in France?

French word of the day: People
Photo: Annie Spratt/Unsplash/Nicolas Raymond

Why do I need to know people?

Knowing people is good for your mental health since loneliness is… Oh, you mean why do you need to know the French word people? Well, to avoid misunderstandings like that.

What does it mean?

People in French is a false friend – a word which seems identical to an English term but which has a different meaning.

More specifically, it’s an example of the French adopting an English word but changing its meaning – another example is the word basket, which in French refers to a trainer or sneaker.

Because in French, the word people does refer to, well people, but only those in a specific category. Namely: celebrities.

It’s very often used in the phrase presse people, which refers to gossip magazines like Closer and Voici.

It leads to sentences which can sound funny to Anglophone ears, like this recent headline from local newspaper Sud Ouest: Bassin d’Arcachon : mais où sont passés les people ? (Arcachon Bay: where did all the celebrities go?)

Be sure to properly pronounce the L when using the word in French – it’s very occasionally written as pipole, which signals to native French speakers how to pronounce it phonetically.

Use it like this

En été, j’aime bien lire des magazines people à la plage – In the summer, I like reading gossip magazines at the beach

J’ai vu beaucoup de people pendant mes vacances à Cannes – I saw lots of celebrities while I was on holiday in Cannes.

J’aime pas la presse people, elle ne respecte pas la vie privée des gens – I don’t like gossip magazines, they don’t respect people’s private lives

Member comments

  1. “which refers to gossip magazines like Closer and Voici” and perhaps “People” magazine here in the US (LOL),

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For members

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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