Very briefly noted, this morning’s morning name, the stock insult in French:
parler français comme une vache espagnole, literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’, conveying ‘to speak French badly’
I heard this first from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and our good friend Benita Bendon Campbell, It’s vivid and silly, and then English like a Spanish cow can be adapted as a critique of someone’s linguistic abilities in French or English or, I assume, any language. Cows being linguistically quite limited, and Spaniards being one of the nationalities French people are inclined to mock (though I would have expected the cow to be Italian, Dutch, or German; or of some exotic despised nationality, like Turkish or Chinese).
There’s a considerable body of folk linguistics — what I think of as the Why a Cow? genre — in which the noun vache is taken to be a mistaken reinterpretation of some phonologically similar word that might make more sense. Notably Basque ‘Basque’ or basse in one of its senses (‘low person’, ‘bass guitar’, ‘basso’). There doesn’t seem to be anything to recommend any of these imaginings.
But the question remains: what’s the actual backstory? when did the expression arise, in whose mouths or pens, in what context? Here I don’t have access to good sources and am throwing myself on the resources of my readers. Speculative story-telling is easy, but what are the facts?
November 11, 2025 at 5:18 pm |
‘Vache’ is used in other insults, not only in this one. ‘Mort aux vaches’ ≃ ‘death to cows’ was once the standard, unmarked way to insult a policeman. There is an instructive Wikipédia article at
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mort_aux_vaches_! ,
and Anatole France’s story Cranquebille revolves around multiple speech acts containing the expression, see
en.wikisource.org/wiki/Crainquebille,_Putois,_Riquet_and_other_profitable_tales/.
November 12, 2025 at 11:52 am |
Nice. So vache is insulting all on its own.