Has this post been exhausted yet? Nope. (A recent comment there: "If Jordan Peele doesn't use this as a sound effect, we riot.")
This reminded me that, despite all the syncs leading up the release of the Jordan Peele film NOPE, I never actually got around to watching it. I thought I'd peruse the plot summary on Wikipedia and see what it was about. When I opened the Wikipedia page, though, I first clicked on "Reception" to see if people had generally thought it was good (they had, natch), and then I started pressing "Page Up" to get back to the plot. Two page-ups took me to the soundtrack listing, though, where the title of the third track arrested my attention: "La Vie C'est Chouette." I wondered what chouette meant. Well . . .
Although "owl" was the meaning highlighted by Google, chouette is apparently much more commonly used as an adjective, meaning "nice, pleasant," and that is how it is used in the song, by Jodie Foster. When I looked up the lyrics, this bit got my attention:
Toute une nuit, mais avec qui?Toute une nuit, mais avec qui?La vie c'est chouetteAll night, but with who?All night, but with who?Life is nice ("owl")
Qui, unlike our English who, doesn't sound like owl onomatopoeia, and the possibility of a deliberate bilingual pun seems remote.
I was led to this song by my post about Michael and an Owl. When I first linked Michael and the owl, in "The Locust Grove crop circle," it was through the word qui:
If the serpent is the Metal Worm, who is Michael? He's Mr. Owl, of course. In the de Vos painting of Michael, written around his hand is the Latin motto Qui ut Deus? -- a translation of the literal meaning of the name Michael. In English, it would be Who is like God?
and then a gif of a blinking owl saying "WHO?"
10 comments:
hehe
Did you know that Saint Michael, Archangel, Prince of the Heavenly Host, once poked a hole in a man's head because he got ticked off with him?
That one went over my head, ben.
@William
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubert_of_Avranches
I remember right around the time you had started posting owl syncs, I was looking at the libretto for Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and was struck by a (to me) odd reference to owls ("civette") in "Aprite un po'quegli occhi". In the context of a general warning/rant regarding the untrustworthiness of women, there's a passage that goes:
Son streghe che incantano
Per farci penar,
Sirene che cantano
Per farci affogar,
Civette che allettano
Per trarci le piume,
Comete che brillano
Per toglierci il lume.
So the comparisons start with "Witches/Sirens/Owls/Comets". Apparently "civetta" also means "flirt, coquette" in Italian, which I've never thought of as a particularly owlish characteristic.
I'd briefly considered commenting at the time; the mention of "chouette" here reminded me.
Incidental Disclaimer: Despite the name, I'm not much of a French speaker.
@Henri
Comets you say?
@Henri
Civette che allettano -- "little owls that entice" -- what a strange turn of phrase!
One of the definitions given for chouette is femme âgée, méchante et désagréable, "a mean, old, disagreeable woman," which makes much more metaphorical sense.
@ben
Etymolgically, comet means "long-haired" and was sometimes an epithet of Aphrodite, so I suppose it makes sense in the context in which Mozart places it.
Owls are also associated with a Mesopotamian image of a naked woman who may be Inanna or Lilith, and to whom archaeologists have given the rather Mozartian moniker "Queen of the Night."
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/658/the-queen-of-the-night/
Hah, to think this sync line picked up again partly due to a meme from a game I barely played!
I found a version of that song partially in English, but some lines are hard to make out, and in my search I could only find the full French lyrics. My French is limited to a few words so I went to my usual online translator, which allows use of four different translation engines; comparing results from the three that worked (DeepL was the dud) was an interesting exercise. One stand-out was the line Que l'on soit côté fleur des champs ou côté violence, which ICIBA interpreted as "Whether you are wildflowers or violence" -- versus the other engines' "Whether [we are/you're] on the flower side or [on] the violence side" -- bringing to mind Blodeuwedd, as we've recently discussed. (On another note, going by a Reddit post that came up while searching, owls come up repeatedly in NOPE.)
Looking up the word chouette, Wiktionary narrows its use to "species of owls without ear tufts" and categorises it as a feminine noun, while the given ear-tufted counterpart, hibou, is masculine. Somehow I was surprised to see a chouette disambiguation page on Wikipedia; what grabbed me there was "the Golden Owl quest", a 1993 book of puzzles that lead to an owl statuette buried somewhere in France, which still hasn't been found. The statuette's sculptor, Michel Becker, also illustrated the book.
For a bonus, on November 19 I'd stopped by the Daily Mail for some regular news article, and something in the tabloid-gossip sidebar caught my eye. INXS has come up in my syncs several times, but besides what I've mentioned in email, it's always been through their music until now. One of the band members had dreamt of Michael Hutchence soon after his death: "Michael visited me in a dream as an owl in a field and he said that he is fine and he is free and not to worry, sort of thing."
@WG
Interesting links!
Fleur des champs should be the French equivalent to flos campi, from the Vulgate Song of Solomon (“rose of Sharon”) in English, quoted by Waite in explaining the roses and lilies he had added to his Magician card.
According to the Mike Clelland book on owls, quite a few people have had the experience of a dead loved one’s appearing in the form of an owl.
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