OffQc | Québécois French Guide

A man in Montréal said an equivalent of this while speaking with a friend:

They’ve got no business saying things like that!

He didn’t use the French word choses to say things. Can you think of another way he might have said it? What about the expression they’ve got no business doing (…); how might that be rendered in French?

Here’s what he said, in French:

On a pas d’affaires à dire des affaires d’même!

We’ve got the French word affaires in there twice, but it means something different each time.

In the first instance of affaires, we can liken it to the English word business in the expression to have no business doing something (i.e., to have no right to do something).

An example of this came up back in entry #405, where a character from a television show said:

T’as pas d’affaires à dire ça!
You’ve got no business saying that!
You’ve got no right to say that!

Remember, in spoken language, ne is omitted; that’s why it’s t’as pas and not tu n’as pas. (After ne is omitted, the remaining tu as pas contracts to t’as pas.) In the same way, we’ve got on a pas in our first example, rather than on n’a pas. That said, on n’a pas and the colloquial on a pas sound exactly the same.

The second instance of affaires means things, and de même means the same thing as comme ça. Des affaires de même, then, means des choses comme ça, or things like that.

You’ll notice, though, that I contracted de in the example: des affaires d’même. This means that de loses its vowel sound. To say des affaires d’même, move the contracted d’ to the end of affaires, as though it were dé z’affair’d même. You’ll discover many more contraction tips like this in Contracted French.