OffQc | Québécois French Guide

When paying for an item in a store in Montréal, I asked the cashier if they accepted my credit card. He said yes, and that they accepted all credit cards. Then he said:

On est équipés pour veiller tard!

What did he mean by that?

Let’s look first at what this means literally before trying to understand what he really meant.

The verb veiller means to stay up (i.e., to not sleep). For example, j’ai veillé jusqu’à minuit means I stayed up until midnight. Veiller tard means to stay up late. Literally, then, équipé pour veiller tard means equipped to stay up late.

In its most literal sense, the expression équipée pour veiller tard refers to a woman with large breasts, so much so that she’s “equipped to stay up late” (it’s sexual innuendo; you’ll be kept “busy” in bed until the early hours with that person). Elle est équipée pour veiller tard!

More broadly, you can also hear the expression used in reference to anybody who’s sexually endowed or seductive. This TVA article describes a frog as being une grenouille équipée pour veiller tard because of what appears to be its large penis. The expression also exists in the form amanché pour veiller tard, where amanché means fitted out, decked out, etc.

This expression doesn’t stop there, though. It’s also used in a broader, non-sexual sense of fully equipped — and that’s what the cashier meant when he used this expression. Because they accept all credit cards, they’re “fully equipped.” On est équipés pour veiller tard! (Even though the sense is non-seuxal here, the original meaning of the expression still comes to mind, and so its use is comical.)

I even managed to spot a form of this expression used on a sign in a Montréal bus shelter. The sign reads:

S’équiper pour veiller tard

What’s being advertised here is a bus pass called soirée illimitée, which allows for unlimited use the duration of one night (from 18h to 5h). This time, there’s word play going on here: we can understand s’équiper pour veiller tard as meaning equip yourself to stay up late, because with this pass you really will be equipped to veiller tard.