SV: The second-biggest frog

[Frank Stajano]

At 2001-02-14 14:16 +0100, François Willot wrote:
> > Where did you learn the last word above? Franquin's Gaston perhaps? Do you
> > know what it means?
>
>Indeed Gaston (ask our Italian Gaston expert Eta Beta about it). The later
>means "Nom de dieu" = "for God's sake" !

The question was not "What does it mean?" but "Do you know what it means?".

*I* knew what it meant -- I just wondered if the people who repeated it as 
a cute comic-style curse knew that they were uttering a mild blasphemy.

Note that, as far as I am personally concerned,  I am not in the least 
upset by this, being an atheist. But, to those who follow a religion that 
orders them not to pronounce the name of their God in vain, it might be 
shocking to discover that they just voiced a euphemistically disguised 
placeholder for "name of God".

Similarly embarrassing might be the situation of a non-religious person 
saying something like that (without knowledge of the meaning) in the 
presence of religious people who instead understood it.

There are many other similar cases. The DCML members who are also pikers 
might remember "silverware". The latest I've come across (only through 
retelling, though, so I can't give you any first-hand guarantees about the 
accuracy) is that of Japanese girls happily and unknowingly wearing with 
T-shirts that sport fashionably foreign writings in an unintelligible 
script and language --- which turn out to be unflattering and/or sexually 
oriented comments about the wearer, written in English.

  Frank (filologo disneyano)  http://www.uk.research.att.com/~fms/