A pinch-me moment of realisation over bad French ad
A local restaurant's billboard advert raised eyebrows over its reference to a murder case from 1991
The advert used wordplay involving lobsters and a famous French murder case
Ivan Mirovic / Shutterstock
The seemingly nonsensical promotional message for a local surf-and-turf restaurant on a huge panneau d’affichage publicitaire (billboard advertisement) that your Language Noter passed every day for a week has been gnawing away at me.
I enjoy working out a clever jeu de mots (word play) as much as the next expat trying to sharpen their French language skills, but this one had me well and truly baffled (déconcerté).
‘Homard m’a pincer’, it read, alongside a picture of a lobster pincer. ‘Lobster pinched me’ is the direct translation, but there was one glaring grammatical error in the French – pincer used as an infinitive is incorrect, it should be pincé (past tense).
Whatever the subtext of the phrase, I thought, how has an advertising slogan writer made such a basic error?
Finally I recounted the odd ad to a French friend, who, once the penny dropped, stood in open-mouthed horror. The phrase, he said, is a play on a crime scene message found by investigators on one of France’s most notorious murders.
‘Omar m’a tuer’ – not tué – meaning ‘Omar killed me’ was daubed in blood on a door at the scene of the 1991 murder of wealthy widow Ghislaine Marchal, 65.
Her gardener, Omar Raddad, was convicted of her murder but his defense lawyers claimed he was framed – after all, Marchal was well-educated and would never have made such an error. Raddad was later partially pardoned.
Whilst the cleverness of the word play is admirable, one can only hope that the lobster dish in question is not as tasteless as an advertising slogan which is at best insensitive and at worst, shameful.
