Le mardi 25 Juillet 2006 14:49, Chuck Norcutt a écrit :
> "despond" is a verb so the word here should be "despondency".
I wrongly thought it was an invariable idiomatic.
> Colloquially, it might not work with a lot of Americans. Except those
> from the south (like Walt) where slough/slew/slue is a fairly common
> word, probably half wouldn't know the meaning of "slough" and a quarter
> probably wouldn't know the meaning of "despondency".
Got it.
> "In the swamp/dregs/gutter of depression" might be understood by 80 or
> 90 percent. Of course, OM'ers, being generally smarter and more
> literate, would have no problem with any rendition. :-)
Well, in fact "triste comme les pierres" is litterate too, in french ; more
accurately, it's a cliché. Daumier's sentence is difficult to render
properly, because the contractions / omissions in the syntax are descriptive
of oral, low-class speech, while words and expressions are more litterate.
You must understand that Daumier was working for papers sold to middle- and
upper-class persons, unfamiliar with street slang (which they only heard
spoken by their household employees) ; so he made his sentence sound like
popular speech, but with words his readers could understand, not real slang.
The first writer to my knowledge who used real slang words was Victor Hugo.
--
Manuel Viet
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