Completely OT: Cunning Linguists

[The Medway Handyman]

There is a series of commercials for Borsin cheese on TV at the moment.

The ad is filmed from the viewpoint of someone riding a bicycle with a handlebar basket containing a French stick, a bottle of wine & some Borsin.

The tag line at the end is always "Du pain, du vin, du Borsin". Which makes sense to me. With my limited understanding of the French language 'Du' means 'some' as long as the noun is masculine and the quantity is vague.

The opening line shows a seemingly innocent scene with voice over saying things like "Du loveless marriage" or "Du harlot" or "Du crime scene" etc.

Is there another meaning for 'Du'?

Where would we be without rules?

[The Medway Handyman]

Sorry, Boursin.

[ransley]

Of

[BigWallop]

Try here

Select the languages you need from the drop down menu.

[nightjar]

Du is a contraction of de le and that can be either a preposition (from, to, in, of, by) or a partitive article (some). Overall, there are probably nearly 20 different meanings of de in the singular, although at this time of night, I can't be sure that all would properly contract to de le.

Estimating lengths

Colin Bignell

[Rod]

German for familiar 'you'. :-)

Crap adverts. After seeing what a pathetic 'joke' one was making, I ignore to the best of my ability.

[The Wanderer]

Err, the language in the ads is French.......

[The Medway Handyman]

Of loveless marriage, of harlot, of crime scene? Makes no sense?

[Rod]

Nah! 'Off' (surely it was a typo :-) ) - that's where we would be without the various mentioned items. Lovelss marriage? Off to find some love. Crime scene? Off to find something imteresting to film/watch. Harlot? Off to the pox clinc.

Ummm, or do I see a theory breaking down before my eyes... :-(

[Rod]

Sorry, did I forget the smiley? :-)

Is "Du loveless marriage" *really* French? :-)

[Lino expert]

"Du" does indeed mean "some" - I think it's just picking up on the word being repeated in the tag line of the ad. It's fairly pants, but then it beats that one for whatever-it-is that has that tacky music that they plonk in the middle of something a bit classy like Poirot.

[Fred]

I'm sure it's no less French that "le weekend", "le fortnight" plus a few more I can think of!

[Rod]

Cela aurait pu être vrai. Mais il ne l'est pas! [1]

I searched the .fr domain - and the only occurrences of "loveless marriage" were within English text.

"Crime scene" is more difficult since CSI! Not at all sure.

But I'll give you "harlot", so to speak.

[1] That might have been true. But it isn't. (Thanks Google. Or blame Google if it doesn't make sense to anyone who really knows French.)

[Lino expert]

Donnez moi franglaise any temps.

[Broadback]

I love this advert, it always makes me smile, I particularly like the farmer, his wife and scarecrow. A bit ot of the ot I thought the recent program on adverts was an eye opener, if you did not realise before it showed what a con most ads are.

[BigWallop]

I think it's used in a way we would say A bread, A wine and A piece of cheese. Boursin being a branded name for a cheese maker. By a Frenchman. Who called his cheese "Boursin." Boursin being a surname in the French language.

[Malcolm]

It is supposed to be set in France but one infrequently shown 'effort' shows the bicycle following a tractor with an English (Hampshire) registration plate

I agree that the ads are poor and this shows how poor

Malcolm

[Dave]

Am I the only one to read the title of this thread as "Cunny Linguists" ??? Dave

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[Invisible Man]

No