According to a marketing operation dating back to 2005, every third Monday in January is declared
the “most depressing day of the year”
.
No need for this official name, you will say.
Nothing could be less pleasing indeed than this winter cocktail and a bit bluesy.
The freezing temperatures, the night that comes too quickly the tip of his nose, and the awareness that the resolutions taken on January 1 are already no longer respected make us a bit melancholy.
Do not panic!
Here are a few words selected by the editorial staff to make you smile.
What better than an anthology of these preposterous terms to cheer you up?
” READ ALSO – Five strange words to put you in a good mood
A comforter
You walk with your nose to the wind, your loved one stands by your side, the sun is shining, a warm wind lifts the leaves laid nonchalantly on the ground.
Instinctively, you turn to your dear and tender, and have for him a gesture of tenderness.
You have just given him a
"cuddly toy"
, this
"caress that one gives to a person or a domestic animal"
.
This charming word is widespread in Belgium.
“Doudouce”
is a metonymic derivative of
sweetness
, with a
“reduplication specific to the colloquial language”,
as Bernard Cerquiglini relates in
Enrichissez-vous: parle francophone!
(Larousse, 2016).
A tourlourou
What better word than this when melancholy awaits us?
A
“tourlourou”
is a
“song, an air, a sketch of a coarse comic”
, interpreted at the café-concert or in the music hall by artists dressed as soldiers, according to the TLFi.
Formerly, this name was given as a joke to the soldiers of the line infantry.
Its prefix
“ure”
is formed on the model of
“turelure”
, a word from popular music, which ironically qualifies a
“beaten, rehashed, rehashed air”
.
In the 17th century, a
"tourlourou"
was a
"gallant"
, then from 1830, an
"infantry"
.
a waterfall
There are spirited beings, who like to launch themselves with passion into slightly crazy undertakings.
Alas, their only reward is resounding failure.
They then make a
"cacade"
, a whimsical enterprise that ends badly.
The word designates more generally
“a forfeiture by sudden collapse”
, we read in the Treasury of the French language.
Borrowed from the Provençal
cagado,
the
“saddle”
, it is also in the popular and colloquial language a
“sudden evacuation of excrement”
.
That is charming.
A kakemphaton
From the Greek
kakémphatos
,
“malsounding”
, this unusual term designates
“a comical utterance - often trivial - which occurs involuntarily because of unfortunate sound associations”
, we read in
Oxymore mon amour
, by Jean-Loup Chiflet (Éditions regained, 2021). The examples populate the literature and do not fail to make smile: Corneille writes, in
The Death of Pompey
:
“Because it is not to reign that to be two to reign”
(one also hears “spider”). We read in
Horace
:
“I am Roman, alas, since my husband is”
(
“ugly”
). It would be unfortunate to miss this witty play by the playwright from Arlincourt:
"What?
Did I not tell you that she was my quarrel?”
(
"mackerel"
).
A mazarinade
Pretty and refined, this word had the time to please the eponymous Cardinal.
A
“mazarinade”
is, as Jean-Loup Chiflet notes, a
“piece of satirical or burlesque verse, a pamphlet or a libel in prose, published anonymously in the time of the Fronde, against Mazarin”
.
The latter let it happen,
“because he knew how to get paid!”
.
He would thus have declared:
“The French sing?
It's good, it's good: they will pay!
.
The term appeared in 1651 under the pen of Paul Scarron, author of the
Roman Comique
, entitled
"Mazarinade"
.