When you watch a film, and you don't understand the word?

When you watch a film, you don't understand the word or a word you never heard of, do you write the word down just in case you forget it? For example, smackeroo.

If I'm in a theater, then yes, but at home, I usually have subtitles turned on even it's in English because I'm slightly hard of hearing, so I don't really have to. Plus, I'll Google any unknown words since I have my phone handy. Smackeroo is slang for a dollar in case you didn't already know.

I can relate, though. I saw Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan as a kid, and when Captain Kirk jokingly refers to glasses he receives as a gift as a "Klingon aphrodisiac," I thought aphrodisiac was another word for glasses, much to my dad's horror.

Increasingly I'm watching films at home, so it's usually simple enough to look it up immediately.

It's pretty rare I hear a word I've literally never heard, but I look up a lot of words I have heard because sometimes the literal definitions have connotations (or exclude connotations) you didn't realize. The overwhelming majority of words I look up are sort of for confirmation, or to find those little wrinkles of meaning (like "fluke" meaning not just happenstance, but specifically positive happenstance).

When I watch films in english, I do expect to miss a few sentences here and there, either due to the vocabulary or the pronunciation. I just live with it.

When I watch films in french, well, post-90s movies barely have a 100 words lexicon all together.

When I watch older french movies, I have four dictionaries of gangster parisian slang at home.

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“Truc” partout. I detest that one.

Haha, so true.

When I watch a movie if there's an English word that I've never heard of before (which happens all the time), I don't bother to look it up as 90% of the time the context of the unknown word is clear thanks to the movie's script. If I wrote down every word that I was curious about, it would take me a week to finish a movie

Personally I'd rather not know what the word means. I want to understand as little as possible about a film. Maybe one day I'll go full sicko mode and start watching non-english films without subs.

I did that once when I couldn't find subs. I still 'got' the film and enjoyed it, but I'm sure I missed a lot of deposition and exposition too!

That’s… an innovative approach.

Not even being particularly sarcastic. I remember watching a thriller about nuns in Hebrew. I understood just enough from general context to find it more appealing than I almost certainly would if it were in English and I knew what every word meant.

But it's what makes french so easy to learn !

- Wait, what's the word for...
- Just say "truc".

Modern french evolved from medieval smurf.

Et oui. I don’t hate “truc” anywhere near as much as some of my linguist friends, they just flinch. But it’s just a bit too partout nonetheless.

We think of “truc” as annoyingly modern, typical of teenagers, but Charlotte Brontë’s Villette includes many examples of a similar usage of chose. I think the latter was also used as an adjective sometimes.

I would have been completely lost the first time watching A Clockwork Orange if I hadn't already read the novel by Anthony Burgess. But that actually had a glossary of Nadsat terms in the back.

What French movies are y'all watching that say truc so much? The ones I've seen have a very varied vocabulary.

If the word doesn't seem central to the plot, I let it go. If it seems important, I'll look for context clues. It's when I miss a ton of words that I rewatch a scene. Like Layer cake. I started watching 20 minutes without subtitles, then I restarted it with them. But I mostly watch with subtitles now anyway, not for the pronunciation, but so I can understand everything when there's bad mixing or equalisation.

Better yet mute the film entirely and turn your brightness all the way down.

LOL, I’m sorry, but this had to be the most bizarre movie you’ve ever seen or listened to?

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Probably close second, yup.

Are you defining “truc” as “thingy”? I had a Senegalese friend & we often discussed language. I love the depth & breadth of English: we have a word(s) for everything. I often asked my friend for the name of an object in French & she often didn’t know. For example, I asked her the French for “door wedge”. She had no idea & said it was just a “thingy”.

Apropos, after English, French is the most beautiful language IMO.

I never heard this before.

Interesting because in England we used to say that one pound notes were “smackers”. Haven’t thought of this since I was a child, but wonder if they still do this. Had to have come from the word “smackeroo” I would think.

I think so, yes. And I’m sure there are French words for all these things, but no one bothers learning them. they might just be overly complicated double-barrelled terms. Stillwater, incidentally, has a scene where the little girl is teaching the protagonist French tool names, and I don’t blame him for struggling.

P.S. terms like “la clef à molette”, for instance. I mean, really?

Not that I could name many English building tools to save my life.

“The key to something?”

A while back I was reading & a Brit man in the book mentioned using a spanner. I had to jump out of bed, find my dictionary & confirm that a spanner is a wrench. So many differences here, but most of them I know now.