Whilst reading the article entitled “En Altitude”, I came across the french compound word “pince-fesse”:
Prémices du salon du Bourget, la société Aviaxess a récemment organisé un pince-fesses à l’héliport de Paris
The word “pince-fesse” means:
Bash, cocktail party
Hence the whole sentence could be translated as:
First fruits of the Bourget air show, the company Aviaxess recently organised a bash at Paris’s heliport.
I recently borrowed the film “The Sweetest Thing” from my sister to watch, having notice that there was a French Soundtrack available. The French version of the film is known as “Allumeuses” and I thought that it would help increase my French ’slang’ vocabulary. Here is a list of the new vocab I learnt along with translations – watch out, some are rather vulgar!!
Tortiller
To Twist
Piger
To understand
Balèze
Humongous
Queue
Dick
Déconner
To bullshit, mess around
Avarié
Rotten, rotting
Se pointer
To turn up, to attend
Fumet
Scent, odour, smell
Suinte
Ooze, seep, trickle
Cramouille
Vagina (vulgar)
Foufou
Crazy
Se grouiller
To get a move on, hurry up
Papoter
To chat
Naze
Stupid, knackered, broken
Poisse
Bad luck, misfortune
Chambouler
To ruin
When I get home I’m going to hunt out more DVD’s that I own that have a secondary soundtrack in a language I can understand!
Really enjoyed watching this film in French rather than in ‘American’ 
In the article above I came accross the expression “bayer aux corneilles”.
Et quand une touriste espagnole s’ennuie, elle ne baye pas aux corneilles, elle se met à danser à la sévillane.
The expression “bayer aux corneilles” means:
To daydream
The whole sentence above can be translated as:
And when a Spanish tourist gets bored, she doesn’t daydream – she starts to dance a Sevillana!
The expressions “kézako” or more correctly “quésaco” are both derivatives of the provençal expression “Qu’es aco?” which means:
Qu’est-ce que c’est?
You usually add it to the end of a sentence, for example:
Le pod-casting, kézako?
In English, it means:
What is it?
Whilst reading Jacques Chirac’s stepping down speech transcript in “Le Monde”, I came accross a few idiomatic expressions:
Aller de l’avant:
To go forward, to advance
Avoir à coeur:
To be committed to
Etre aux avant-postes:
To be on the forefront
I was recently doing a translation of a newsaper article for somebody (from French to English) on Cumumis, a great FREE translation service. In the article I came accross the word “Cheval d’Arceau”.
Un “Cheval d’Arceau” is used for gymnastics and can be translated to English as:
Vault or Vaulting Horse
For more information about what a Vault is, have a look at this Wikipedia article.