stup

[Mike Cleven]

Nadja Adolf wrote:
>
> Stup with an "sh" sound is an obscene word in English here
> because it means mamook in Yiddish!

Yes, good grief, it sure does, doesn't it?  Yikes.  A lot more
controversial than Klahoway;Lhaxayem....

Years ago during the Montreal Olympics, the two organizing committees
were the the Olympic Games Organizing Committee and the Olympic
Broadcazsting Authority; the French acronyms were COJO and ORTO, which
are explicitly sexual in Spanish and had to be taken off promotional
billboards in South America.....

Whether it's shtop or stove (Shawash vs. Boston prononciations), this
unfortunate congruity with this particular (rather well-known)
Yiddishism makes this word somewhat anachronous, maybe.

I checked with at least one of my French Canadian friends in Whistler on
the weekend, and he confirmed Yann's input that the French term for a
wood-fire cookstove is "le grand poele" (unless I've got the gender
wrong and it should be "la grande poele", but I think that's just a big
frypan); he affirmed that "la chauffe" might be workable, and suggested
that maybe I'd just misunderstood when listening to my co-dwellers when
they used the word; they were probably talking about the stove as "the
heat", which in our little lost-in-the-woods cabins was exactly what
they were used/necessary for.  As slang, it'd be OK, he thought; but not
valid as a sourceword, at least if we're looking at Pure French (not
misunderstood French) as a legitimate source.

In reference to the coulee/cooley thing, he said that a "coolee"
prononciation _can_ conceivably happen, but only in rapid-fire slang;
the usual Quebec French (he's from Lac St. Jean) would be cou-lay.  He
did confirm that Metis French is substantially different, though, and
"who knows?"......

Mike Cleven
http://members.home.net/skookum/
http://members.home.net/cayoosh/