5/23/17

Peugeot - Mouche du coche?

This 1964 ad for Peugeot seems to be trying to convince us that their cars are built to a high standard. Go ask any car geek you know and ask them if Peugeots are famous for their build quality and reliability. Innovation? Quirkiness? Clever design? Ten out of ten. Rock-solid construction? Errrr...... no. More knowledgeable understanders of Gallic carness are free to contradict this assertion in the comments, of course.

Ask Google to translate the idiom "busybody" into French, and it'll come back with "mouche du coche", which, directly translated back to English, means "fly in the coach". Hmm. Interesting. Do a search on "mouche du coche", and French dictionary sites will tell you it means "kibitzer" or "busy bee". So, it looks as though Google's translation feature is getting pretty good at understanding figures of speech and other non-literally-translatable phrases. That could be handy in the future.



The picky Frenchman in the picture could be useful in your graphical adventures some day too, n'est-ce pas? Let's have the Phil Are GO! Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade (PAGGBPB) pop him out of his native ad, complete his beret for him, and save him out as a PNG on an alpha channel backgorund.







Aah yes, just like that. But what if somebody doesn't want the naturally-yellowed version, and just wants him in pure black and white?

Can do. Hop to it, team....







Formidable! Right click that picky frog onto your "disque dur" for safe keeping, do you can use him to help convince people of your attention to detail, just like the build quality of French cars sort of doesn't.











What? More??? Jeez! Fine. Here's a new t-shirt in our shop, made from stuff we pulled from this ad. now you can show everyone how proud you are of your Peugeot 106, sitting back home in the garage, waiting for a new fuel pump to arrive on the slow boat from Nice.

Link to the Peugeot shirt at our Spreadshirt shop.


Yep. Those cars are sort of arranged in the colors of the French flag. Clever, huh? Yep, that's that attention to detail the French are famous for.

Lastly, you know what's interesting? While, yes, Peugeot does still make cars and bicycles, they make a surprising number of high-end salt and pepper shakers, for some reason. Next time you're in a reasonably fancy restaurant, and you notice the shakers are made of stainless steel (not glass, for some reason), look at the bottom while you're adding some big flavor to your soup and see if there's a Peugeot logo down there. Then you can make the face like the guy in this ad, because you noticed a detail.




4 comments:

[lrf] said...

"One out of every 8 production employees is a quality inspector." Are they bragging about their high-quality manufacturing or just their world-renowned Gallic efficiency and productivity.

PhilAreGo@gmail.com said...

Well, half of those quality inspectors are there to keep re-lighting the Galoises of the other inspectors.

Boom!

Thanks for reading, LRF!

[-Mgmt.]

Unknown said...

I had a 505, named Eric, that was comfortable when it was running. Which was seldom. It inspired me to write a song about it. CarTalk used it as their music on hold for a little while.
https://lehndorff.bandcamp.com/track/peugeot

Jim D. said...

My Peugeot experiences came 25 years ago during a few months I spent in Nigeria. All the cabs were Peugeots, especially 504 wagons, and they were ugly and loud but we always got where we were headed.

I remember one particularly terrifying trip that was a few hundred kilometers, during which we spent a solid hour and a half going very fast indeed . . . my then-fiancee, now-ex-wife leaned over and whispered "Is 160 KPH very fast?" and I said "I'll tell you later." She told me later she could tell by the look on my face that I had composed myself for death.

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