Burials and Bowling

It’s always the weird expressions that will get you…

“I’m just pulling your leg.”  
“What, no you’re not.  You’re not touching my leg.”

“He let the cat out of the bag”
“Wait… who’s putting cats in bags?”

Stephanie and I were looking for a place to go bowling for her birthday tomorrow.  We found a place nearby and while I was looking at their website I stumbled across their page for hosting events.  Professional/business outings, birthdays, clubs, etc.  Then I saw the last option.  It read “enterrement jeune vie”.  Which literally translated means “burial young life”.  I think I gasped. The picture was a young lady holding a bowling ball with a big smile (see the site here).

To say I was thoroughly confused wouldn’t even come close.  Something wasn’t adding up.  At all.  First of all burials aren’t really fun events.  In the US we “celebrate people’s life” at funerals to avoid getting caught up in grief and look on the positive side and see the impact a person had.  Even there, I would consider it a little out of place to go bowling immediately afterward.  And this wasn’t just an “enterrement” or burial, it was the burial of a young life.  How much more sad and tragic.

So I did what any good language learner does.  I opened my browser to google translate and type the term in.  It only confirmed my original translation.  So I jumped to the conclusion that it was a different cultural value.  Yeah, it still felt way, way off.  I told Steph about it and she was also throughly confused.  After about 30 minutes of talking and translating, I finally saw something else on the page which translated to “Plaza (the name of the business) loves people who will soon be married.

At that point some gears started turning.  Grinding is maybe a better term for it.  Then it came together.  The ‘burial of a young life” is a way to say bachelor party.  We started laughing.  What a funny way to express that!  But then the French always seem to get pessimistic in their expressions.  For instance, when you learn something new, you don’t say, “now I can go to bed a little smarter tonight” – you would say, “now I can go to bed a little less dumb”.

At least we know that we probably won’t be called on as grief counsellors when we go bowling.