Commentary
We old farts here at klugness.com are familiar with the French phrase "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?" from the 1975 Patti Labelle song "Lady Marmalade ." Spoiler Alert: The phrase translates from French to English as "Do you want to sleep with me tonight?"
Rather than providing the correct translation, however, we thought it might be fun to make up several incorrect alternative translations of the phrase into English. Why, you ask? Of course, it's because of our strong dedication to humor.
Most of the fake translations are based on English words that sound kinda sorta like the French ones. Obviously words that happen to sound like the French word aren't necessarily going to be translations, and therein lies the humor. We also included a few phrases that are once removed from the English phrases that sound similar to the French ones. For example, attentive readers may spot oblique references to words such as "toupé" and "Shah" which sound vaguely like "coucher" and "moi." Yeah, super funny, right?
Well, perhaps not, but it's our lil boutique website, and we reserve the right to write material that we believe is whimsical and fun, even if no one else agrees with us, or even knows about it. The bad news for such negative Nellies is that we enjoyed ourselves so much with Part 1 that we're planning to stretch this topic from one to two funny top ten lists. So look for Part 2 in a few days.
Some items include English words that are derived from French words and sound sorta like the French words in the phrase (Items 10, 9, 7, and 1), but nevertheless aren't accurate translations. For example, crochet, croquet, and touché sound sorta like "coucher" but do not translate as "sleep with." We also tried to exploit the fact that the French word "coucher" looks sorta like the English word "couch" (Items 8 and 2).
If you enjoyed this topic, you might also enjoy our top ten list containing fake translations of Oye Cómo Va (List 172) . There we poked fun at the fact that the song is by Santana, who played at Woodstock back when the young folks were all hippies.
