I had occasion to find out what the French for a "seam ripper" is. It's my title: everything you could want: elegant, non-violent, intelligible - and not something I would ever have guessed in a month of Sundays.
Last edited by martyn94 on Thu 25 Feb 2016 16:51, edited 2 times in total.
martyn94 wrote:I had occasion to find out what the French for a "seam ripper" is. It's my title: everything you could want: elegant, non-violent, intelligible - and not something I would ever have guessed in a month of Sundays.
And coming apart at the seams.....? 😀
A couseuse is a seamstress so the word extraction is fairly logical
Sus wrote:ok, so now I am intrigued on how you found this out!?!
I followed my usual strategy for abstruse products. First I looked in my Larousse and got nowhere. Then I put a search for "seam ripper" into Amazon.fr. You get lots of results only in English, but if you persevere you find someone who describes it as, eg "seam ripper/découseur". Then you put "découseur" into Amazon.fr and get many more results. The same thing works on eBay.fr.
It's the wonderfully logical (and hence Cartesian, and hence French) idea of an "un-sower" that appealed to me. Us Anglos go for the more concrete idea of "ripping".
Sue wrote:un-sewer to be precise or you taking seeds out the ground. Sorry but I could't resist.
You can tell that I'm not much of a seamster, though I can do buttons. Strange that seamster is the masculine, or non-gendered, form of the word though "brewster" is a female brewer and "spinster" a female spinner. I can't even blame it on the spell check this time.