Overheard: A woman in her late 20s in Montréal lamented to a friend about her personal situation. With the way things were going, the woman said she’d probably end up in the street with all her stuff.
To end up in the street is finir dans la rue. But maybe you’ll remember that the words dans la have a high tendency of contracting in spontaneous speech.
Dans la can contract to dans ‘a, which sounds essentially like dans when the vowel sounds of dans and ‘a come together. We can show this informal contraction in writing with an apostrophe: dans’.
Instead of saying dans la rue then, she said dans’ rue.
Two words used to talk about “stuff” include affaires, which you might already know, and stock, which you might be unfamiliar with.
When the woman talked about ending up in the street with her stuff, she said all my stuff as tout mon stock.
We saw the word stock in a past entry when it appeared in an episode of the television show Les Parent — in that scene, Louis is helping his son with his homework. He’s surprised his son’s having trouble because the homework is easy stuff. He says to his son: C’est du stock de troisième année! This is Grade 3 stuff!
We saw stock again in another entry when a person who noticed I was carrying a lot of stuff in my arms said to me: T’as pas mal de stock. You’ve got a lot of stuff.
Remember, pas mal isn’t a negation; it’s an expression. Pas mal de means a lot of, quite a bit of.
Say the words pas mal together:
T’as / pas mal / de stock.
