It's Such a Common Word Though!

Jan. 10th, 2003 at 6:33 PM

weather	:	mainly clear
outside	:	3°C
mood	:	hmmm...

It amazes me how many people don't know how to spell the word "voilà" as in the word you use to call attention to something, or express satisfaction or approval of something.

I've been seeing "wah-la", "wa-la", "wa-lah", "walla" ... all over the place.

It's French and literally translates as "see there". "voi" is the conjugated form of the verb "voir" in the second person singular [indicative], command tense, with the last 's' dropped. It's supposed to be "vois-tu".

là is "there".

Comments

( 14 comments — Leave a comment )

buttaflii

Jan. 10th, 2003 06:35 pm (UTC)

I've never seen people spell it wrong.. that's weird.. :P

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bride

Jan. 10th, 2003 06:39 pm (UTC)

Re:

I think East Coast Canadians are much less French-averse. =)

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buttaflii

Jan. 10th, 2003 07:23 pm (UTC)

Heh.

Yeah, what with Ottawa being so close to Quebec and the whole.. bilingual thing going on... I think I ought to be able to manage 'voila!' :P

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bride

Jan. 10th, 2003 07:25 pm (UTC)

Re:

Yeah, and Canadians in general are better at (at least) pretending to know some French than, oh say... Americans =D

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ugly_boy

Jan. 12th, 2003 12:07 am (UTC)

Hey! How dare you, Americans are very culturally sensitive and make a point of pronouncing and spelling foreign words correctly, like puhteet, wahlaw, animay, dim some, fo paw, onwee and chow main. I’m personally offended.

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pne

Jan. 11th, 2003 04:20 am (UTC)

Wouldn't simply "vois!" be the imperative? "vois-tu" sounds like a question to me.

(And there's also "voici", probably from "vois ici" ["look here!"] or something like that. I'd use that when showing someone something... "Voici un livre pour toi".)

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bride

Jan. 11th, 2003 02:39 pm (UTC)

Re:

I wanted to use "tu" in there to show that that's the "you". It's the "tu vois" as opposed to "je vois"... there's a difference, really =P =D

"Voici" isn't a commonly used term in English though. "Voilà" is.

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ugly_boy

Jan. 11th, 2003 11:42 pm (UTC)

Look here/look there are the literal translations, but in French and English [though I don’t see voici in English] both seem to be used as here/there is… as in:

-Tiens! Voilà Hélène.
-Look! There’s Hélène.

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ugly_boy

Jan. 11th, 2003 11:53 pm (UTC)

Yes, vois is the imperative for the tu form, or, I suppose the je form if you could use it that way.

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badkarma_05

Jan. 11th, 2003 06:27 am (UTC)

Well, I guess I'm guilty. Luckily French is a language that is dying out. In fact, English is also slowly starting to decline also. However, Spanish is soaring.

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bride

Jan. 11th, 2003 02:41 pm (UTC)

Re:

You're wrong, Chinese will take over. =)

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ugly_boy

Jan. 11th, 2003 08:10 pm (UTC)

I rarely see it spelled wrong, the accent is often left out but seeing as it’s not always easy on English keyboards to make accents, I suppose this is excusable. I’m guessing it’s so often spelled wrong because people say it more often than they read or writ it. In English it can be replaced with ta-da, I’m here, look who’s there and a number of other things.

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