[This is one (of many over the years) that got away. It was a joint effort, with a French co-author, the interprète de conférence and traductrice Alexandra Bigaignon, to look at those areas of language, accent on slang as ever, where the images underpinning French and English both mimicked each other and diversified. The aim was for me to research then write in English, for her to augment my lack of French and then to offer a French éditeur (alerte aux faux amis: publisher not editor) a finished text. We decided on saucisson/sausage as the pitch chapter. Sadly, while we found interest, takers there were none. Still, you may be amused, mes petit(e)s plats de charcuterie.]
‘Rompre l’andouille au genou’
One might wonder quite why this humble foodstuff, this confection of chopped and spiced meat, originally encased in the guts of the animal from which it had been taken, has been chosen as an object of both disdain and desire. Yet it has, on both sides of the Channel, even if while English offers but a single standard term, sausage, France has four, andouille, boudin, saucisse and saucisson, each recognising a different recipe for its creation. The dried version, a salami, is originally Italian, and is common to both. The word comes from a root meaning salted, as do saucisse and sausage. Boudin is possibly linked to a root bod-, meaning blown up or inflated, while andouille is seen as coming from Latin inducere, to introduce, in the sense of pushing the meat into its casing.
Two meanings are held in common: the object is innately foolish and via its tubularity it is equated with the penis. The first perhaps reflects the traditional jester’s or fool’s inflated pig’s bladder used as a mock weapon; the second is unashamedly linked to the shape. Saucisse and andouille, or andouille pelée (suggesting further absurdity: the casing has been removed) all mean a fool. Une grande saucisse is both tall and stupid. The idea of limpness may underline the UK phrase drunk as a Polony: like the drunkard the polony, i.e. Bologna sausage, cannot stand up. And the Bologna sausage is no more respected in French: un saucisson de Bologne is an inelegant individual, overweight and ill-dressed. That said, it may simply steal from France’s soûl comme un polonais. Here the two nations are of one mind: English offers full as a polack, although this was apparently another hit at the French since it mocked the Polish-French Maréchal de Saxe, a great tippler. French also has rond or plein comme un boudin, very drunk.
The UK terms tend to add a tone of affection: sausage and silly sausage would not be terms of offence and quite possibly used of a child.
Faire l’andouille is not culinary but means play the fool. It also may also suggest the secondary, phallic meaning, since the equation of penis words and fool-words is common, or certainly in English. The best translation would be act like a prick, i.e. a penis. And if the sausage lacks its fleshy filling, it is naturally even more limp: une personne molle comme un boyau lacks both energy and intelligence; the English equivalent, and still phallocentric, is a limp dick. English also offers offers weenie, from Vienne/Vienna (and ultimately from the German Wienenwurst), meaning all three.
The andouille has been recorded as a slangy synonym for the penis since 1178, with a more recent variant andouille de calcif, which, since calcif is actually slang for caleçon, boxer shorts, has a quasi-cousin in the English pant-python or trouser-snake; there is also the andouille à col roulé, England's turtleneck or polo-neck (similarly forms of sweater). Meanwhile the sexy sausage is certainly popular in the UK. A man may sink the sausage, i.e. have sex, (France's tremper son biscuit also plays on a foodstuff, while the image of soaking is also parallelled in dip the wick, or get it wet), while his partner has a live sausage for supper. The couple can play hide the sausage, hide the salami or sink the weenie. The masturbator slaps his sausage. To fellate is to eat sausage. The sausage as penis can be a snorker (from Australian snork, a piglet), a round steak, and a hot dog.
The sausage itself may be raw, or live, though this last was coined for a 17th century translation of Rabelais and was used there to translate andouille, one of a magnificent list of terms used to celebrate the infant Pantagruel’s penis. Among them was what Rabelais termed a couille bredouille, and which the English translated as a chitterling, properly an animal intestine, another meaty delight and a staple of soul food. Before leaving Rabelais it’s worth noting his satirical War of the Andouilles (bk IV xxxv-xliii), in which the sausage (and its allies the ‘savage Blood Sausages and the Mountain Sausages’) combined its literal meaning, its penile one, and works as an attack on Protestantism.
At which point the English pretty much leave the sausage to the chef. Not so the French. Nor do they exclude its sexuality. Slang for the boudin itself has been un vit de nègre which would be ‘Englished’ as nigger dick, did that not mean a large cigar. A saucisson or a boudin can both suggest a fat and/or immoral old woman (the English would call her an old boiler, i.e. poule). Un boudin can also be young: a short, chubby, undemanding and above all grateful girl, who a man can use for sex while waiting for ‘Miss Right’. This unashamedly sexist term was the basis of Serge Gainsbourg's 1987 song ‘Les petits boudins’ (sung by Robert Farel). Less ‘affectionate’ was British singer Rhoda Dakar’s 1982 single ‘The Boiler’, told from the girl’s point of view and culminating in her rape.
Still misogynistic, the boudin cavaleur, planche à boudin and boudin à ressort1 have all been slang for a whore. Slang also gives rouler une saucisse (also se filer or se passer des saucisses), a deep, tongue-entwined kiss; what the British indeed term a French kiss, as well as, punning on the organ and the foodstuffs, a tongue sandwich or tongue sushi. (Other forms for the kiss are rouler un patin – the most commonly used – une pelle, une galoche or, food again, une escalope. Faire du boudin ou faire son boudin come from bouder, to sulk, rather than boudin but bouder also comes from the root bod, referring to something that has been inflated. Un boudin can also be a long, spiral curl of hair, which in English is a sausage curl, like a ringlet but arranged horizontally across the head.
If England can manage sausage dog for the teckel, the saucisson à pattes or saucisse à pattes, France is more prolific when it comes to using sausage to suggest physical imagery. Être ficelé (tied up) comme un saucisson is to be badly dressed, saucissonné, -ée, is to be crammed into clothing that is too tight, as is être boudiné. Fat round fingers are doigts boudinés which is a perfect fit with English sausage fingers. A dépendeur d’andouilles is a very tall man. This may simply come from the long thin shapes of both, but there is an underlying etymology: wads of drying tobacco, once known as andouilles, were hung up from the roof: only a tall man could reach up and unhook them. And avoir essuyé les lunettes avec de la peau de saucisson is to clean one’s glasses badly.
Then there are the Germans. The krauts, as the English tabloids still rejoice in calling them, from sauerkraut (choucroute) although sausage or sausage-eater will do. France seems to have resisted this link, although, thinking food rather than phobia, the nation was once nicknamed choucroutemanes. On the whole choucroute is neutral. Pédaler dans la choucroute conjures up a pleasing image of slow progress, the dismissive rien à voir avec la choucroute equates to nothing to do with the price of tea or rice in China, and avoir la choucroute un peu aigre (bitter) is what the UK terms to have sour grapes. Une choucroute also means ‘big hair’, but here the UK forsakes the charcuterie for the beehive.
With the exception of the English not a sausage, i.e. nothing at all, France has the monopoly on the remainder of the sausage’s imagery. Quand les andouilles voleront, il sera chef d’escadrille is never, English maintains the ‘meatiness’ with when pigs fly. Ne pas attacher ses chiens avec des saucisses, to be a miser, suggests that the dog will eat up this improvised ‘lead’ and run off; not what the greedy miser desires. Faire du boudin, i.e. to have a nosebleed, suggests that this boudin is noir.
And when is a sausage not a sausage: in a variety of phrases that at first sight defeat explanation. Tirer le boudin de la taule, to bolt the door, can only refer to the elongated shape, however implausible the action, while rompre l’andouille au genou, to perform a pointless and impossible task, seems to compare the soft, pliable sausage with a piece of dry wood, a good deal more susceptible to being snapped across one’s knee.
The phrase s’en aller en eau de boudin has existed since the 16th century. Its meaning is clear: to turn out badly, to encounter a problem or give something up (a more vulgar, and meat-free version is to partir en couille, reminiscent of the UK balls-up, whether as noun or verb). In English it could be to go down the drain, although that phrase refers to any form of dirty water. Its etymology is less simple. Although the obvious link is to ‘sausage water’, water either issuing from a sausage or used for its cooking, it would appear that this is a false trail. One needs return to the root bod-, which can refer to the chest or navel, and the fact that boudin can mean penis. Thus the eau de boudin is either urine or even diarrhoea. This old term has been succeeded by s’en aller en brouet d’anguille (‘water in which eels are cooked’), to have one’s hopes confounded. The opacity either of the cooking water, or perhaps the water used to wash out the gut in which the boudin is contained, may however lie behind c'est clair comme de l'eau de boudin, which English would term clear as mud.
Finally se poignarder le melon avec des saucisses plates (‘stab yourself in the head with a flat sausage’). The meaning is to make a fuss about nothing, to worry un-necessarily. The most likely image seems to be the same ‘softness’ that underpins rompre l’andouille au genou, and again the task, as well as being absurd, is of course impossible; and while eschewing the butcher for the grocer, the English equivalent is nail jelly to the wall or jello to a tree.
English translations are somewhat confusing: boudin cavaleur: a cavorting sausage, planche à boudin, a board on which blood sausage is made and boudin à ressort, a spring-loaded coil have no special suggestion of ‘sex for sale.’
Also in Italian-American, "sazeech" is slang for the penis, based on "salsiccia" from the Italian. Which then spawned, "sazeech his own," as a playful way to say "to each his own." To my shame, I have not yet used this in a publication, but I will race to be the first citation of "sazeech his own"!!!
‘Salsiccia’: I initially thought, ah, 'salsifis' (right shape) but then I checked. My sense is that one could, given the polyglot skills, see phallo-charcuteric imagery across the international board.