When my daughter took french in HS i told her you only need to learn two words--"I surrender."

she was not amused :-(


Freedom Fries!

MAGA!

;-)

/r

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Steve

Hahahahahahaha! That's great! ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

If you meet him just say "vous etes in imbecile" Sorry spell correct keeps changing u n to in.

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They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

Perhaps he should go to Normandy and read the names on those 9,387 headstones.

If not for U.S. soldiers, that twit would be speaking German, not French.

This is from some time ago, probably completely inaccurate, but still makes me chuckle just the same:


Subject: The Complete Military History of France


Gallic Wars - Lost. In a war whose ending foreshadows the next 2000 years of French history, France is conquered by of all things, an Italian.


Hundred Years War - Mostly lost, saved at last by female schizophrenic who inadvertently creates The First Rule of French Warfare: "France's armies are victorious only when not led by a Frenchman."


Italian Wars - Lost. France becomes the first and only country to ever lose two wars when fighting Italians.


Wars of Religion - France goes 0-5-4 against the Huguenots


Thirty Years War - France is technically not a participant, but manages to get invaded anyway. Claims a tie on the basis that eventually the other participants started ignoring her.


War of Devolution - Tied. Frenchmen take to wearing red flowerpots as chapeaux.


The Dutch War - Tied


War of the Augsburg League/King William's War/French and Indian War Lost, but claimed as a tie. Three ties in a row induces deluded Frogophiles the world over to label the period as the height of French military power.


War of the Spanish Succession - Lost. The War also gave the French their first taste of a Marlborough, which they have loved every since.


American Revolution - In a move that will become quite familiar to future Americans, France claims a win even though the English colonists saw far more action. This is later known as "de Gaulle Syndrome", and leads to the Second Rule of French Warfare: "France only wins when America does most of the fighting."


French Revolution - Won, primarily due the fact that the opponent was also French.


The Napoleonic Wars - Lost. Temporary victories (remember the First Rule!) due to leadership of a Corsican, who ended up being no match for a British footwear designer.


The Franco-Prussian War - Lost. Germany first plays the role of drunk Frat boy to France's ugly girl home alone on a Saturday night.


World War I - Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States. Thousands of French women find out what it's like to not only sleep with a winner, but one who doesn't call her "Fraulein." Sadly, widespread use of condoms by American forces forestalls any improvement in the French bloodline.


World War II - Lost. Conquered French liberated by the United States and Britain just as they finish learning the Horst Wessel Song.


War in Indochina - Lost. French forces plead sickness, take to bed with the Dien Bien Flu.


Algerian Rebellion - Lost. Loss marks the first defeat of a western army by a Non-Turkic Muslim force since the Crusades, and produces the First Rule of Muslim Warfare: "We can always beat the French." This rule is identical to the First Rules of the Italians, Russians, Germans, English, Dutch, Spanish, Vietnamese and Esquimaux.


War on Terrorism - France, keeping in mind its recent history, surrenders to Germans and Muslims just to be safe. Attempts to surrender to Vietnamese ambassador fail after he takes refuge in a McDonald's.



The question for any country silly enough to count on the French should not be "Can we count on the French?", but rather "How long until France collapses?"

And this oldie but goodie (again, may be completely inaccurate but still worth a chuckle or two):

Great Minds Speak on the French
>
> "France has neither winter nor summer nor morals.
> Apart from these
> drawbacks it is a fine country. France has usually been governed by
> prostitutes."
> ---Mark Twain
>
> "I would rather have a German division in front of me than a French
> one behind me."
> --- General George S. Patton
>
> "Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your
> accordion."
> --Norman Schwartzkopf
>
> "We can stand here like the French, or we can do something about it."
> ---- Marge Simpson
>
> "As far as I'm concerned, war always means failure"
> ---Jacques Chirac, President of France
>
> "As far as France is concerned, you're right."
> ---Rush Limbaugh
>
> "The only time France wants us to go to war is when the German Army
> is sitting in Paris sipping coffee."
> --- Regis Philbin
>
> "The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any
> better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.
> True, you can sit
> outside in Paris and drink little
> cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and
> drinking large glasses of whiskey I don't know." ---
> P.J O'Rourke
> (1989)
>
> "You know, the French remind me a little bit of an aging actress of
> the 1940s who was still trying to dine out on her looks but doesn't
> have the face for it."
> ---John McCain, U.S. Senator from Arizona
>
> "You know why the French don't want to bomb Saddam Hussein? Because
> he hates America, he loves mistresses and wears a beret.
> He IS French,
> people."
> --Conan O'Brien
>
> "I don't know why people are surprised that France won't help us get
> Saddam out of Iraq. After all, France wouldn't help us get the
> Germans out of France!"
> ---Jay Leno
>
> "The last time the French asked for 'more proof' it came marching
> into Paris under a German flag."
> --David Letterman
>
> How many Frenchmen does it take to change a light bulb? One. He holds
> the bulb and all of Europe revolves around him.
>
> "The heaviest cross I had to bear was the Cross of Lorraine"
> ---Winston Churchill

He probably already speaks German as most Europeans I've ever met are usually multi-lingual. But yeah, the comment was over the top.

You're right. Would it have been more appropriate to tweet that on September 1st? Wrong day and definitely wrong tweet, don't they teach anything in Ambassadorship 101? That said, the number of American pundits/commentators/politicians who endlessly lecture Europe on appeasement while simultaneously ignoring isolationism is really large. I doubt that you have ever taken notice of that.

C'est la vie....

By the way, seems like a good time to plug the movie "Darkest Hour"!!

He shouldn't have tweeted it at all. That's what you learn in Ambassadorship 101. But the French diplomatic corps is seemingly fond of lecturing the rest of us about how learned and wise they are, I suppose. ;-)

I'm with you on "Darkest Hour." Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill. Can't wait to see it.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Lived in Italy. It's easy to be multilingual when your forefathers basically whored themselves out around the Continent for centuries, and you live about a 30-minute drive away from another language. ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Maybe he went to the same school that Trump did.

My observation about how tweeting makes a person disengage their brain applies, of course. ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

"va chier" would probably be closest direct translation. literally, it means something like "go take a shit" but for all practical purposes it's about "fuck you" or "go fuck yourself."

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____________________________________
https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

This is a French equivalent of:
"Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists" - GW Bush, President of the USA

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Remember - It's important to be comfortable in your own skin... because it turns out society frowns on wearing other people's

I am from Europe and speak four language (front door bragging :-) ). It is easy to do so as we in Europe have the tendencies to move borders every once in a while :-)

Did you also tell her the joke about how you found WWII French Rifles on EBay with the description "Never used. Dropped Once."?

Yah. Only every once in awhile. ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Ugh. Don't remind me. ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Ooh, I gotta remember that one! May come in useful... ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

In all seriousness, the flip side of this (as anyone who's played Risk is shirley aware) is that France, being essentially in the center of the continent, is awfully hard to defend. The same advantage to ease of traveling there as a tourist nowadays has always been a massive disadvantage when it comes to the ease of getting there for foreign armies, with little in the way of natural geographic or climatic barriers to help ward off invaders and being vulnerable on multiple fronts. It's easy to poke fun at them today for such a dismal military history and write it off as a function of their cultural psyche, but I've always thought it was kind of a chicken/egg deal of having it beaten into them over many generations at least in significant part due to inherent geographic disadvantages.

ETA... My boy likes to study linguistics, and how it's reflective of cultural history; our favorite example of the fluidity of borders and the mingling of languages in western Europe over the centuries is that 'mushroom' in German is simply the French word for mushroom (the distinction being something found in nature as opposed to a borrowed term for a prepared food item such as croissant or schnitzel).

The French found out the geographic realities of a defense in depth (or the lack thereof) the hard way with their Maginot Line. They have a difficult border to reliably defend, from a military standpoint. War on the Continent is HELL, that's for sure.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

How would they know, they've never accomplished that !

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"I think I've cracked the code. double letters are cheaters except for perfect squares (a, d, i, p and y). So Leddy isn't a cheater... "

OH, SNAP! ;-)

I didn't mean to turn this into an indictment of La belle France in whole or in part. Just that ambassador.

But I do think that the last Frenchman to really kick a$$ on the border and such was probably Charles Martel in 732 CE. LOL!

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

And he wasn't even French

He was a Frank. Good enough for government work, right?

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Kind of reminds me of Israel.

Greg

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If you are a Canuck that engages in gratuitous bashing of the US, you are probably on my Iggy List. So, save your self a bunch of typing a response unless you also feel the need to gratuitously bash me. If so, have fun.
"Don't underestimate Joe's ability to f___ things up" - Barack Obama, 2020

Or why do the French line there roads with trees?



To provide shade for the Germans.

If not for the French during the American revolution we'd all be speaking English. Oh wait...

LOL! Forgot that one.

If you're not pedantic then sure

Ummm ... your son might want to take a more careful look at that. "Mushroom" in French is "champignon", a word that almost any Western person knows due to the proliferation of French cuisine. Yes, if you say "champignon" to a German, they will likely understand, as would a Swede or an American.

But "mushroom" in German is "pilz".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWUaT5ovZ50

OK, I'll file that away. Is it a regional thing, or has it always been so? We were taught champignon when I studied Deutsch in college, anyway.

If you were taught 'champignon' in a German class than it's probably more regional than I realized!

I've lived in the Rhineland and it's predominantly "pilz" there - but people use 'champignon' too. But in Austria (where I have family) you'll hear "pilz" and "schwammerl" an awful lot more than "champignon".

Comparing the wikis on the two words (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champignons, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilze) would seem to indicate that 'champignon' is more specific, 'pilz' more general.

The answer to your question is "Va te faire foutre." If you want to be more formal, "Allez vous faire foutre."

Funny that the gnomes translate the first as KMA, the second as "Screw you". Translation engines don't seem to do well with colorful vernacular.

Maybe we can get somebody with a humanities degree to work on that!

Sorry, but I don't have any foot problems that I know of. ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Google is your friend

I should have been more precise. As ruler of the Frankish Empire -- which encompassed all of modern-day France, Martel -- who was Germanic -- could claim his victory at the Battle of Tours/Poitiers, against the Muslim hordes of Abdul Rahman, as a Frenchman (if that term was around then), if that suited him. The Latin name of the Franks was "Franci" and they gave their name to the later kingdom of France.

So really, he really was the last Frenchman to successfully defend the borders of France and repel a foreign invader. Hahahahaha!

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

I meant for the definition of pedantic

Damn! And here I was in full-on pedantic historian mode!! ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Deutschland uber alles! That would have a better impact than GFY.

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_____________________
Fester from Detroit, Mi

Side note... using your logic to make him french makes him Belgian

Americans should not be mad at France.
If it had not been for France during the revolution, all you Americans would have spoken English now.

Little late to the party...that joke already used

And you confirmed the joke with your answer.

But still funny the 20000th time around. But just think of it - had the British won, you'd have much better gun control laws, a better health care system and could proudly call yourself the 11th Canadian province. AND - you could travel to Cuba without any restrictions whatsoever.

France: the Halvard of Europe, fold when they aren't threatened. (You still haven't answered if you felt intimidated by the Forge's innocuous comment)

Eyeroll emoji

Re. when criticizing the French military we need to remember how the geography makes France so difficult to defend. Not the geography. The leadership just wasn't committed.

WW1. One of the take-aways from the "Guns of August" is that the French wanted WW1 as much as the Germans. The French were planning to strike into the S of Germany and drive all the way to Berlin. They saw that the Germans were moving forces N to attack into France on an axis well N of their own planned attack and they were good with that. They reasoned that every German unit that got pulled N made their sector weaker. The French weren't too interested in moving their own forces N to counter the Germans. They were all about audacity. They didn't need artillery because of "audacity". They didn't need logistical support because "audacity".

Because the French were in the S and the Germans were in the N. ~80% of the French Army faced about 10% of the German Army. On the first day of the French attach, they pushed about 10km into Germany. On the 2nd day they were thrown back. But we never hear about this, because WW1 is all about German aggression.

Pre WW2. A couple years ago I listened to the 3 volume Churchill biography by Manchester. It's a fascinating look at the Brits from Victorian times to the 50's. I learned a lot. One of the interesting take-aways was all the opportunities that the French and Brits had to stop Hitler prior to him become a real threat. Apparently there were numerous times when either German politics or German generals would take him down, as soon as he over-reached. But he didn't over-reach. The French and, to a lesser extent the Brits, backed down each time. An example is the Rhineland, a sizable region between Germany and France that was demilitarized after WW1. The German generals were just sure that if Hitler carried out his plan, France would march into the Rhineland and set things to rights, and the German generals would use the resulting loss of face to take down Hitler and shoot him.

But, to the enormous aggravation of the German generals, Hitler's mad plan to march troops into the demilitarized Rhineland succeeded. The Germans marched in some token force and the million strong French Army, instead of using some of that audacity, wrung their hands and wanted to consult with the Brits on the issue for a couple months. So one more win cemented Hitler's power.

WW2. Still drawing from the Manchester book...recall that the invasion of France was totally predictable. A state of war already existed after Germany invaded Poland. But even in the final months before Germany attacked Poland, France was still selling heavy artillery and tanks to customers around the world, instead of keeping them for their own use. The French leadership was never serious. The French had a bigger Army and in some important areas, better equipment. And they got steamrolled. That's not the fault of the guys at the pointy end, that's a leadership problem.

If you read about the battle of Stalingrad, you'll read about some Russian Infantry platoon that was holed up in some stout building at the edge of no-mans land. The Germans attacked that building over and over again and the platoon did serious damage to the Germans. That single platoon of Russians, prob 20 dudes, were responsible for more German casualties then the French caused in the defense of Paris.

That said. I've worked a bit with the French Foreign legion. Those guys are hard SOBs.

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Books @ Amazon
"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart

The best things about the French are their fries and toast.:)

I can't figure out how to get lavendar using my phone.

>>
They didn't need artillery because of "audacity". They didn't need logistical support because "audacity




L'audace, l'audace. Toujours l'audace.



( 6 years French in Oz HS --= take that ! )

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RayGovett
Hughson CA
Be Prepared-- Strike Swiftly -- Who Dares Wins- Without warning-"it will be hard. I can do it"

In terms of appeasement, it is worth remembering that just 20 years earlier Britain and France between them had lost well over 2 million casualties out of a combined population of 80 million at the time. That's about 6% of the male population, must be getting on for 20% of 18 to 30 year olds. That's going to have a pretty big impact on your appetite for another war, and in Britain's case they've always been reluctant to get involved in land wars in Europe unless they really need to anyway.

That's fair. Folks pitch on Chamberlain for appeasement but he accurately represented the feelings of the Brits (and the French). The incredible casualties of WW1 had turned the huge optimism of the Victorian age, into something gray and despondent. The appeasement was not Chamberlain's fault. The Brit and French people had their hearts ripped out by WW1. They were desperate to prevent another conflict.

But when I think of appeasement, I think of the Brits and French failing to stand up to the Germans when they started breaking treaties re. re-armament, or occupied the Czech Sudatenland. The options for the Brits and French, in those situations were not great. Invade Germany because the Germans were (deniably?) rebuilding their military? Or for the Sudatenland, attack all the way across Germany in an attempt to kick the Germans out of Czech? These were both terrible options.

But the Rhineland was different, I'd argue. The French, if they'd really wanted to, could have in 24hrs, put 10x as many troops into the Rhineland as the Germans had. It was a complicated period tho. I'm sure, in the academic world, there's lots of conflicting ideas.

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Books @ Amazon
"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart

Most war historians believe that had Britain and France acted in concert militarily several years before 1939 they probably would have been able to quickly back Hitler down and prevent Germany from annexing the Sudetenland and then invading Poland, providing the Brits and the French key time needed to more sufficiently rearm and forestall or even completely prevent Germany's march through Western Europe.

But as others have pointed out, the horrors of WWI were still fresh on the minds of many leaders in both countries -- and abhorrence and fear of another war may have prevented cold-eyed thinking about its possibility. Militarism had also been part of the German character -- owing partly to its Prussian heritage -- for many decades and centuries, and was no new thing on the Continent, so their rearming wasn't exactly a surprise.

In certain respects, leadership in Britain even sympathized somewhat with Germany, believing that the Treaty of Versailles -- which France insisted on enforcing strenuously when it came to war reparations and such -- had laid too onerous a burden on the German nation.

No one had ever seen a person like Adolf Hitler, though. He was the proverbial monkey wrench in the works and Europe outside of Germany wasn't prepared emotionally or intellectually for the former Austrian corporal and what his coming presaged.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."