It's Not Terrible

One of the most tempting dangers in learning a language similar to your native tongue is to calque. This involves taking a word from your native language and assuming it means the same thing in the second language.

The most embarrassing example is likely when an English-speaking woman tries to employ the Spanish word "embarazada". You would think that both 'embarrass' and 'embarazo/a' come from similar Latin origins and so mean the same thing. But they don't! A young American lady in an awkward situation might be tempted to say, "Estoy embarazada." But she would be wrong: "Estoy embarazada" means "I am pregnant". After trying the word out with her Latin American friends she would likely be even more embarrassed.

A reverse calque also exists, where you assume a word means the same thing as it does in your native language. Recently I have struggled to wrap my mind around the French phrase "C'est pas terrible." Each time I hear it, I assume it comes from the Latin 'terribilis' ('scary', 'frightening') and so means "It's not terrible", or, in other words, "it's good".

Unfortunately, in common French usage, it doesn't actually mean that. The French word "terrible" began much as the English word 'terrible'--a bad, scary, awful thing. However, at some point along the line, French people started using it to mean 'awesome' or 'rad' or 'sick'. The last word, in fact, provides a good parallel. 'Sick' is a bad thing normally; no one wants to spend the day in bed, puking his or her guts out. But when some college student from California says, "That's sick!" that's not what he has in mind; he means quite the opposite--"it's cool".

That's what has happened with the word 'terrible'.

The French have another linguistic tendency--to praise things by negating a generally negative word rather than using a positive word. The French say, "C'est pas mal!" ("It's not bad") all the time when Americans would say, "It's great!"

And so it was inevitable that the French would begin to say "C'est pas terrible!" when something is not that great.

If this blog post seems a little long, at least now you have an idea of the gyrations my mind goes through everytime a French person says 'c'est pas terrible'.

C'est pas terrible.