Test your Britishness

Cristobal said:
OK.
Scunthorpe seems to be a nice and welcoming city...

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I have never had the pleasure of visiting but it does look lovely :)
 
Got the feeling when I first heard this ( or a similar quote ) it was translated for me as along the lines of, " there is one who loves and one who consents ( to being loved, I guess ) ", which could seem mildly sceptical.

JohnnyO. o/
 
chris.hale said:
"There is always one who kisses, and one who turns the cheek." What's disturbing about that?
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It sounds clunky and there is a double entendre.

1) it does not sound natural, although it seems to be grammatically right, a French would not say/write it like that (reason why I asked whether it was originally in French, because to me it looks like a translation in French):
"Il y en a toujours l'un qui baise, et l'un qui tourne la joue"
A French would say: Il y en a toujours un qui baise, et un qui tourne la joue (no "l'", it's sounds wrong...)

2) "baiser" is the literal translation of "to kiss/kissing", BUT, in slang or in an informal way, it means "to f*ck/f*cking". It depends on the phrasing and the context. However, in this case, because of the way the verb "baiser" is used, a native French speaker could read/understand:
"There is always one who f*cks, and one who turns the cheek."
I am pretty sure that a translator would write it in an other form, a fortiori a native French speaker.

EDIT: an elegant translation would be:
Il y en a toujours un qui donne un baiser, et un qui tourne la joue.
"donne un baiser" means "gives a kiss", this way there's no doublemeaning.
 
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Can we organise a shaving test?

The citizenship test wasn't in place when I landed on the beaches of Blighty but I fully support having it plus more.

And the first question to you, which shaving brush manufacturer introduced a glowing in the dark brush circa 2017?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk
 
Glowing shaving brushes ? Sounds like Sheldon Cooper, the messy pooper; to match his glow in the dark goldfish. But then he wasn't a manufacturer, so you got me Shemen.

JohnnyO. o/
 
I hoped it to be a little more difficult to be honest, but it is better than I feared it would be

I did the American test a few years ago - aced it! Did better than my USAF colleagues!
 
Cristobal said:
It sounds clunky and there is a double entendre.

1) it does not sound natural, although it seems to be grammatically right, a French would not say/write it like that (reason why I asked whether it was originally in French, because to me it looks like a translation in French):
"Il y en a toujours l'un qui baise, et l'un qui tourne la joue"
A French would say: Il y en a toujours un qui baise, et un qui tourne la joue (no "l'", it's sounds wrong...)

2) "baiser" is the literal translation of "to kiss/kissing", BUT, in slang or in an informal way, it means "to f*ck/f*cking". It depends on the phrasing and the context. However, in this case, because of the way the verb "baiser" is used, a native French speaker could read/understand:
"There is always one who f*cks, and one who turns the cheek."
I am pretty sure that a translator would write it in an other form, a fortiori a native French speaker.

EDIT: an elegant translation would be:
Il y en a toujours un qui donne un baiser, et un qui tourne la joue.
"donne un baiser" means "gives a kiss", this way there's no doublemeaning.
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I don't speak French but found the phrase on Oxford References. Unfortunately there's no way on a tablet to open to windows side by side so I couldn't compare them directly.
 
chris.hale said:
I don't speak French but found the phrase on Oxford References. Unfortunately there's no way on a tablet to open to windows side by side so I couldn't compare them directly.
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I googled it. There's no results in French.
My understanding is that it is a phrase in French but from a book in English or by an English author.

With calm despair, he stirred himself to sum up what was in his mind, what was in his life. It took him a long and labouring time; but presently he muttered, aloud: 'Il y en a toujours l'un qui baise, et l'un qui tourne la joue.'
Monsarrat Nicholas - The Cruel Sea
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And this:
There is always one who KISSES, and one who turns the cheek
French in origin: Il y a toujours l'un qui baise, et l'autre qui tend le joue (quoted in Emma
B. Cobb ‘What Did Miss Darrington See?' in Harper's Monthly, 1870).
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So definitely, it has not been written by a French, although it is supposed to be so, hence the double-meaning and the clunky phrasing.
 
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Bogeyman said:
"Clunky"? The only time I have read and/or used a form of that word was in describing an old automobile in bad condition, e.g., "An old clunker."
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Perfidious Albion has triumphed yet again Bogey. We have contamined Cristobal with our colloquiolisms. We'd use clunky to describe almost anything which didn't perform smoothly or looked clumsy.
Thankies Shemen, though a genetically modified brush woulda been kind of cool.

JohnnyO. o/
 
Cristobal said:
I googled it. There's no results in French.
My understanding is that it is a phrase in French but from a book in English or by an English author.
.
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The Cruel Sea is where I encountered it, I understood it to be 'Old' French which explained the phrasing (the en and l') and the inadvertent(?) double entendre. I'm not a French scholar though, or even a fluent speaker but I had encountered Balzac's version before, which made me think there was an older origin for it and Balzac was being smart with it. Montserrat's ancestors were French and his mother was called Margueritte but I've no idea whether he even spoke French.
I took a lot of it's meaning from the context in which it was used. Some are givers some are takers in whatever part of life, smutty or otherwise.
 
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