OffQc | Québécois French Guide

John just completed an 8 km run with RunTastic and nobody gives a shit, confirm his friends

That’s the headline used in an article from Le Navet, which I’ve translated into English.

Le Navet is a québécois humour site that publishes satirical articles in French. The articles are written in a convincing journalistic style, making for very comical reading! If you’re looking for something new to read in French, give Le Navet a try.

The headline from above reads like this in the original French article:

Jean vient de faire une course de 8 km avec RunTastic et tout le monde s’en sacre, confirment ses amis

The article then reports on Jean’s use of the RunTastic application, and how none of his Facebook friends give a flying fuck about his status updates regarding it:

Un homme originaire de la banlieue nord de Montréal vient tout juste de compléter une course de 8 km en 50 minutes avec l’application RunTastic et pas mal tout le monde s’en câlisse comme de l’an 40, ont confirmé avec conviction plusieurs de ses amis joints par Le Navet cet après-midi.

A man from the metropolitan area north of Montréal just completed an 8 km run in 50 minutes with the RunTastic application and pretty much nobody gives a flying fuck about it, confirm with conviction several of the man’s friends who were contacted by Le Navet this afternoon.

I’ve chosen this article in particular because it contains some language that we’ve been looking at recently on OffQc. There are also some other vocabulary items in the article that I wanted to draw your attention to.

1. Tout le monde s’en sacre.

Nobody gives a shit. Nobody gives a damn.

This comes from the article’s headline. The verb s’en sacrer means the same thing as s’en câlisser, which we looked at in a different entry dealing with the expression je m’en câlisse, or “I don’t give a fuck.” The phrase je m’en sacre means the same thing as je m’en câlisse.

2. Pas mal tout le monde s’en câlisse comme de l’an 40.

Pretty much nobody gives a flying fuck.

In English, when you really, really don’t care about something, fucks can start flying. In French, they’re more like the year 40. Hell yeah!

We looked at the expression pas mal in the last entry. This expression isn’t a negative — quite the opposite, in fact. We can translate pas mal tout le monde as “pretty much everybody.” Example: pas mal tout le monde est d’accord, “pretty much everybody agrees.”

I also wanted to draw your attention to some vocabulary used in the article related to Facebook status updates.

3. une publication

The article uses the word publication to refer to an update on Facebook. One of Jean’s friends had this to say about Jean’s RunTastic updates: Je dirais que sur vingt-cinq publications au sujet de ses courses, absolument aucune ne m’a le moindrement intéressée, “I’d say that, out of twenty-five updates about his runs, not a single one interested me in the least.”

4. J’aime son statut.

When you like someone’s status update on Facebook, tu aimes son statut. Jean’s friend admits to sometimes liking the RunTastic updates when none of Jean’s other friends like or comment on them: Parfois, j’aime son statut juste parce que je trouve ça gênant que personne réagisse.

Hmm, can you relate to that?

You might like to now review how to talk about blogging and blog posts in French. You can review words like un blogue and un billet.

[This entry’s vocabulary from: Le Navet, Jean vient de faire une course de 8 km avec RunTastic et tout le monde s’en sacre, confirment ses amis, lien]