French Insulf for Brits Roast Beefs

Why do the French telephone call the British 'the roast beefs'?

Insults written on a memorial to British war dead in a French cemetery have been deplored in France. One of the slogans used specially stood out. So why exercise the French call the British "les rosbifs"?

Calling someone a "roast beefiness" is a strange insult, although in its fashion not much stranger than calling someone a "frog".

Simply the graffiti on the war memorial in Etaples, northern French republic, was clear: "Rosbeefs go habitation."

The rest of what was written on the monument in the cemetery in Etaples - "Saddam will win and spill your blood", "Dig upward your rubbish, it is fouling our soil" - left no doubtfulness about the attitudes of the graffitists.

But why should they have used the discussion "rosbeefs"? (The usual spelling for this particular French nick-name for the English is "rosbif" - the graffiti spelling is presumably an attempted translation.)

Rosbif has two distinct meanings, and only one of them is usually intended as an insult.

In the most pop cookery books of France... roast mutton and lamb are designated Rosbif de Mouton, and Rosbif d'agneau

Kettner's Book of Table, by ES Dallas, 1877

Linguistics expert Professor Richard Coates of Sussex University says the phrase was originally used as a gastronomic term, referring to the English fashion of cooking beef.

"Rosbifs became a marking of the Englishman as far as the French were concerned in the 18th Century, merely because it was a very popular fashion of cooking," he says.

"That mode began to utilise to other meats cooked in the aforementioned way, and then you would likewise have 'rosbif de mouton' and that sort of thing."

Thus an English term becomes part of the French vocabulary, similar "le weekend", function of a spread of the English language which infuriates many French. Rosbif as a name for roast beefiness, however, carried on spreading and is now also used in Spain and Italy.

Pretty inoffensive

Past 1850, the phrase had been extended to mean Englishmen themselves. William Makepeace Thackeray wrote in The Virginians: "Only my white cockade and glaze had saved me from the fate which the other canaille [rabble] of Rosbifs had deservedly met with."

INSULTS, 1712-STYLE

Nick Frog - Dutch

Louis Baboon - French

John Balderdash - English language

Source: Low is the Abysmal Pit, Arbuthnot

In whatever case it is, despite the offensiveness of the war graves graffiti, generally a "pretty inoffensive insult", says Mr Coates.

The heated argument between the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland and France over British beef, after France illegally maintained a ban on imports which the rest of the Eu had lifted iii years earlier, may have breathed new life into the insult.

"Rosbif" is a parallel insult to "frog", in that many English see it as being only mildly offensive.

It would surprise many casual users of the "frog" insult to know, however, that it dates dorsum to the 1300s, and originally applied to the Jesuits and the Dutch, long before it referred to the French.

Marsh dwellers

"Information technology only changed to the French when they became the national enemy of the English," says Jonathon Green, author of the Cassell Lexicon of Slang.

"Information technology originally applied to the Dutch because they were seen as inhabiting marshland, simply there are citations from 1805 onwards in which it applies to the French." This would probably have had less to do with living in marshland than with eating frogs.

A Paris butcher defies the French ban in 2000

He adds that in some low-lying parts of Lincolnshire, specially the part known as Kingdom of the netherlands, people sometimes refer to themselves as "yellow bellies" - an repeat of the Dutch being chosen "frogs".

But the world is total of national and racial insults based on what people eat. Greenish dubs information technology "gastro-nationalism", and says information technology has "the benefit of several antagonistic worlds: non simply racial departure, but those e'er-absorbing bones of contention, manners and gustation".

The Racial Slur database lists hundreds of such terms, including "locust eaters" for Afghans, "salmon crunchers" for Alaskans, and "casserole-heads" for Hungarians.

American use of the discussion "limey" as shorthand for British is another example, referring to the eating of limes by British sailors who were anxious to avoid scurvy.

SEE Besides:

westmorelandropened.blogspot.com

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2913151.stm

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