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Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:463:L'Emmerdeur (Jeremy Bornstein)

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Quicksilver's page for L'Emmerdeur

Stephensonia

More subtle digs at the French? Heh.

Authored entries

L'Emmerdeur

The French term "L'Emmerdeur," which in the novel refers to Jack Shaftoe, is difficult to translate precisely. The literal reading is something like "The guy who covers stuff in shit," but it's more like a curse of admiration in this case.

There is a panopoly of French epithets based on "merde," a somewhat vulgar term for fecal matter which by itself corresponds to the English "shit." Its usage in French curses, however, is more like the English "fuck." Screaming "emmerdeur!" at someone is more or less equivalent to screaming "fucker!"

Alta Vista's Babelfish translates Emmerdeur to "Bloody nuisance".

Curiously - considering the Enoch Root character - there is something possibly bearing on Emmerdeur in the Wikipedia article about the Biblical character Enoch:

 In critical scholarship, Enoch is regarded as being a character based 
 on the extremely ancient Sumerian myth of Emmeduranki (also 
 known as Emmedurana),...

Now is this similarity of name just happenstance? Come now. This is Stephenson!

The term for doing the opposite, "demerder", is the origin of the so-called "Système 'D'", the provenance of a very clever species of sous chef according to chef/author Anthony Bourdain; pretty much any of Stephenson's heroes, from Sangamon Taylor on, could be described as masters of Système 'D'.

"Systeme 'D'" is also a term used by members of the French Foreign Legion for centuries when visiting a strange port of call or station. A core group of legionnaires would choose a bar/restaurant that had developed a reputation of mistreating soldiers and would patronize it one evening, running up massive tabs they were unable to pay for, start a fight, and promptly start wrecking the place. Other teams were put about setting up obstacles and obstructions to law enforcement's ability to respond to a call when the propreitors sounded the alarm, thus helping to effect the escape of those involved in the core mayhem.