2 days ago
French Word of the Day: Far West
Why do I need to know
Far West?
Because
you might be confused about why French protesters might use this English phrase in their complaints.
What does it mean?
Far West
- roughly pronounced far west (with a French accent) - is the French term, albeit written in English, for the 'wild west'.
You will see French media use it to describe the literal 'Wild West', meaning the area west of the Mississippi River in the United States in the 19th century, seen at the time as 'untamed' and lawless.
The term has also gone on to refer to anything unregulated or outside of the law in French. Sometimes the term is written as
Far West
,
far-west
or even
farwest
.
For example, most recently, unions representing ride-share drivers (ex. Uber, Heetch, etc), demanded caps on the total number of drivers.
They complained:
On veut tout simplement contrôler les effectifs, responsabiliser les plateformes numériques et arrêter ce far-west numérique.
(We simply want to regulate the workforce, make digital platforms accountable and put an end to this digital wild west).
The genre of
Westerns
(the same word is used in French, though pronounced in a French manner) also found popularity in the early 20th century, and later in the 1950s and 60s.
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During the silent film era, French filmmakers, like Joë Hamman, made their own versions of early 'westerns' in France, in the Camargue coastal region near Montpellier in the south. These were called
les films western camarguais.
Use it like this
Je ne pense pas que j'aurais survécu dans le Far West. Je ne suis pas doué avec les chevaux. -
I don't think I would have survived in the wild west. I'm not good with horses.
L'internet est devenu le Far West pour les enfants. Il est temps que le gouvernement commence à le réglementer correctement !
- The Internet has become the Wild West for children. It's time the government started regulating it properly!
