stup

[Nadja Adolf]

So la chauffe is a heating stove?

If it's shtop (rhymes with stop) or "Shtope" (rhymes
with rope) I could probably get away with it.

If it's shtup (rhymes with stoop) it could get me
fired if someone heard me on the phone!

nadja

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Cleven [mailto:ironmtn at bigfoot.com]
> Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 11:59 PM
> To: Nadja Adolf
> Cc: CHINOOK at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Subject: Re: stup
>
>
>
>
> 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/
>