| Lonely Planet™ · Thorn Tree Forum · 2020 | ![]() |
trinque (french)Interest forums / Speaking in Tongues | ||
Can a french speaker help me translate this slogan I saw on an anarchist poster yesterday in Paris. | ||
The religions sow, the people carry the can / pay the piper. | 1 | |
thanks, istvan! | 2 | |
Eh? No idea what trinque means but "carry the can" and "pay the piper" have two completely different meanings. They can't both be right! The full expression is "He who pays the piper calls the tune" ie is in charge. "Carry the can" means to take the blame and comes from the days before indoor plumbing when someone lowly would literally have to carry the can full of night soil out of the house to get rid of it. | 3 | |
I've thought that "to pay the piper" also means to accept the unpleasant results of something you have done, and that "to carry the can" has a similar meaning. Of course, I'm no English native speaker, and my French is rather limited too. | 4 | |
An online dictionary translates "trinquer" into "take the rap". Perhaps this is a better translation. | 5 | |
#4 -- You're right about "pay the piper," at least in the US. | 6 | |
"Carry the can" is a new one for me. I've never heard that idiom before. Michael Quinion calls it mainly British English. He relates it to beer, not chamber pots If you look up "pay the piper," you find more definitions along the lines of "take the consequences" rather than "be in charge." (Or, as one source put it "money talks.") Some say it derives from the Pied Piper of Hamelin, although in that case, there were consequences for NOT paying the piper. | 7 | |
I've always thought that "pay the piper" had the connotation that the person with power had to exercise it responsibly, which I think is different to accepting the blame or taking the rap for a situation. | 8 | |
Trinquer in French has two meanings: the traditional one is of clinking glasses together when you drink to something | 9 | |
#8 -- I've never heard it with that connotation. I've heard it with two: (1) Who pays the piper calls the tune. For example: googling around, I see a reference to China, which gives a lot of aid to South Africa, making sure that they didn't invite the Dalai Lama for a visit; and (2) the trinquer sense, often in the phrase "Who'll pay the piper? | 10 | |
I forgot you can't use apostrophes in descriptions of links. Link to google search for "who'll pay the piper?" | 11 | |
To use an apostrophe, replace it with ' That's ampersand pound/hash 39 semicolon No spaces around it. Don't forget the semicolon. I hate misplaced apostrophe's becomes I hate misplaced apostrophe's | 12 | |