En réponse à jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM :
>Legman (who wrote the book in 1969, I think) glosses the phrase as "trimming a
>quill". What word is used in France today for a quill pen?
"stylo-plume". The "stylo" part (which alone means "pen") is mandatory.
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En réponse à Mark P. Line :
> >
> > Once again, you're proving to me that you speak a very archaic form of
> > French. I never heard "tailler une plume" for whatever meaning you're
> > saying. *Nobody* refers to a pen as a "plume" except in poetry and in the
> > set phrase "nom de plume": "pseudonym".
>
>1. The expression is metaphorical (or was originally metaphorical);
Of course. It is referring to the quill, which is the main work tool of the
writer.
>"plume" is not being used to refer literally to a pen unless French men
>have some rather transhuman anatomical features I don't know about.
LOL, I wouldn't be surprised if they had ;)) .
Context: AEQSA: Association des Echangistes _Québécois_ Swingers
Association. So maybe "tailler une plume" does indeed exist in Quebec. But
I was only talking about French as it is spoken in France, and as such what
you're giving is not an argument. There are too many kilometers and too
many years between us and our American cousins to be able to treat the
French as spoken there and the French as spoken in France as a single
entity, lexically speaking. It is well-known that French as it is spoken in
Quebec features very different expressions from French as it is spoken in
France (nobody in France swears by referring to religious furniture for
instance ;)) ). So an argument about Quebecois French doesn't in any way
change my views and experience in what exists and doesn't exists in French
of France.
> > And yes, I may be definite about that, but I have the weight of experience
> > listening to speech nearly everywhere in France.
>
>So, you look back upon a lifetime of wandering the French countryside
>listening to people talk about blowjobs?
Not a full lifetime (not old enough for that yet), but you have to realise
that I'm gay, and among gay people it's not that uncommon to talk about
blowjobs ;) . And I didn't wander the French countryside, but I've met
people from about everywhere in France (just not all at the place where
they live).
Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.