French phrase of the day: Ivre, il
Because it's sort of the French equivalent of Florida man.
What does it mean?
Ivre, il
- roughly pronounced as eve-ruh-eel - means drunk, he. This is not grammatically correct French - the noun
ivre
(drunk) is usually paired with the verb
être
-
je suis ivre, tu es ivre, il est ivre
etc.
Where you will see
ivre, il
is in newspaper headlines - it's a shorthand way of saying that a drunken man did something, and will be followed by a description of what happened. The convention is that the headline is written in the present tense.
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For example -
Ivre, il perturbe le bal des pompiers et insulte six gendarmes des Deux-Sèvres
- Drunk, he disrupts a fireman's ball and insults six police officers in Deux-Sèvres.
Because this is such a common formulation in headlines it has become a bit of an in-joke and there's various social media pages and websites collating the best '
Ivre, il
' headlines - giving the lie to the notion that all the French are civilised drinkers.
Although
ivre, il
is the most common formulation it can be used for women -
ivre, elle
- or groups -
ivre, ils/elles
- and the formula is sometimes also known as
ivre, virgule
(drunk, comma).
It's somewhat similar to the Florida man joke in the US, where headlines might read something like "Florida man steals alligator and dresses it in bow tie".
This isn't one you would use in conversation, if you want to talk about being drunk, you will need to conjugate it with the verb in either the present (
il est ivre
- he is drunk) or the past (
il était ivre
- he was drunk).
Examples
Ivres, ils promènent un lama
- Drunk, they take a lama for a walk
Ivre, il propose de la drogue aux policiers
- Drunk, he offers drugs to police officers
Ivre et perchée sur un toit en pyjama, elle s'attaque au mur du voisin
- Drunk and perched on a roof in her pyjamas, she attacks her neighbour's wall
These are all real headlines, you can find more in
this collection
from the French regional newspaper Sud Ouest.
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