In English, ferme la bouche literally translates to fold your mouth. Don’t you know someone you’d just love to lay this one on? It sounds much less crass in French. Most things do. Take Va te faire foutre. Say this to someone in Paris and you’ll lower your already low popularity to zero as you’re telling them to go f*ck themselves. But it sounds so much more pleasant, doesn’t it? So hey, everyone please feel free to Va te faire foutre. With love and conviction.
Those French. They make everything pleasant and beautiful, well that is except their blatant rudeness toward tourists. Everyone needs to go to Paris at least once. I plan on going back for Christmas Eve through New Year’s Day. Face it. The holidays start to get to be a bit of a bummer when your relatives and friends start keeling over left and right, when your impeccably decorated table setting of sixteen dwindles to six. The conversation’s more intimate and no one is likely to say Va te faire foutre at the dinner table, even if you take the last piece of pecan pie. That’s because now the holidays will be spent abroad so in lieu of a slice of Pecan Pie, you’ll be grabbing that last éclair. You stand a better and much quicker chance grabbing something over slicing something. Saisis-le. (french for grab it)
Back to those non-stop yappers who need to ferme la bouche. There are coping mechanisms you learn in therapy to deal with these obnoxious buncha blabber mouths. The easiest one is called pivoting. That’s where you sense a conversation going south and pivot to the east or west but certainly not north. North is the worst direction to pivot toward. Why you ask? It breeds conflict.
So what do you do? The answer is clear. You fold your mouth. No one can talk your ears off if you fold it, shut it and pack it away. That’s a one sided blab, like playing tennis against nobody. If you know any of these blabber mouths it’s high time that we – the innocent recipients of said blabbage – save the world from unnecessary verbal pollutants. So for the sake of global warming, if you master one French phrase let it be ferme la bouche. It’s all in the spirit of planetary health (and your ears).
It’s a period at the end of a sentence a paragraph a soliloquy a rant or a rave or a run on sentence that suffers from the lack of any sort of punctuation a cuz its just keeps blabbing and blabbing and never stops and never gets enough much unlike the Michael Jackson song don’t stop til you get enough these people don’t ever get enough so they invade our space and our chance at societal peace without regard for any consequence to us being victimized by their annoying and irreproachable habit from hell and back at neck breaking speeds that exceed our speed limits on listening and processing irrelevant talk talk talk …
It’s not adult-like to identify problems without offering solutions, though most people do so. In that spirit I submit a plea deal with RFK Jr. to stop all COVID vaccinations and bring back those protective KN95 face masks.
Happy days shall be here again!