I used to know roughly where I was with French youth-speak. If you heard a word you didn’t understand, there was a fair chance that if you split it up into its component syllables and then inverted them, you’d end up with something Molière might have recognised.
Since that tended to be tricky in mid-conversation, it was usually easier to ask the youth concerned what the hell he was going on about. But afterwards it was always fun working out these linguistic sleights-of-hand — known as verlan, from l’envers or the reverse.
Simple verlan words are now so much part of the Gallic lexicon they feature in the better dictionaries. They include meuf, from femme (woman); keulf (more often keuf), from flic (cop); teuf (from fête or party); keum (from mec or bloke); and skeud (from disque or CD).
Things got slightly more complicated when you were dealing with more than one syllable. It took a little while, for example, to work out that trome was métro (the tube), turvoi was voiture (car), sketba was baskets (trainers), zicmu was musique (music), zarbi was bizarre and kommak (or kommas or even sakom) was commeça.
And you really needed your wits about you when they started verlanising entire phrases. Portnouaque, another term on the lips of just about everyone under 30, is actually n’importe quoi (any old how, useless, rubbish) given the verlan treatment. As in: ”Cette teuf, c’est portnouaque” (this party’s crap).
You had to keep up with the abbreviations, too. Geuz means penis and is a contraction of geuzmer , which is itself verlan for merguez (a spicy sausage). And when words got adopted by TV presenters, they’d go through the mill a second time — rebeu is re-verlan for beur, which is verlan for arabe (Arab). Still with me?
Anyway, I fondly believed I was not a complete idiot in the eyes of the Playstation generation until I let slip (rather coolly, I thought) a couple of impeccably inverted syllables to our babysitter, Radija, the other night. She’s a polite girl, but that didn’t stop her laughing.
Verlan? Forget it. It’s just no longer chébran (from branché, or trendy), mister face-de-fesse (buttock-face or imbecile). These days, to be really cool, you have to use Arabic or English words (such as ”cool”), or go in for a bit of Gallic metaphoric constructionism.
English is in, with words such as boss, cash, destroy, girly, top, deadline, old lady, warm-up, ruffneck (sic) and roots elbowing out their French equivalents. Variations might confound native English speakers, however: cowboy is a policeman, freaks signifies different, and airbags are a woman’s breasts.
Arabic also figures strongly. Kif (joint) has become a verb and now means to have fun or to like something a lot, while casbah means home and woualou (”nothing at all” in Arabic) is the hip alternative for portnouaque (remember portnouaque?)
But the best new words need a leap, Radija explained: a Mururoa is a particularly beautiful girl, an upgrade from the earlier bombe. (Mururoa was the Pacific atoll where France tested its nuclear warhead). A Bounty — after the bar — is a black person trying to be white, être sur pause (as in the VCR button) is to be unemployed, and a nuigrave is a cigarette (from the government health warning, Nuit gravement àla santé).
I hadn’t really got a chance, she said kindly. It wasn’t that I was a hamster (an idiot) or even too Gaulois (excessively French). I just wasn’t on-line (with it). And I was, well, just the tiniest bit joibour (that’s verlan for — oh God, you work it out. I’ve had enough). – Guardian Unlimited Â