I was reminded the other day of a French expression we looked at on OffQc almost one thousand posts ago and haven’t seen since: d’enfer.
In #130, a teenaged character from a tv show said he was going to get an amazing appartment. He said: j’vas avoir un appart d’enfer.
Appart is an informal contraction of appartement. The final t of appart is pronounced. In j’vas (a spoken equivalent of je vais), vas rhymes with pas.
I was reminded of the expression d’enfer when I saw this telephone publicity in a shopping centre: Branchez-vous avec un téléphone d’enfer.
Se brancher means to connect oneself, so, in English, we might say the text from the ad as get connected with an amazing phone, hook up with a hot phone, etc.
There’s also the more literal English expression a hell of, of course, as in a hell of an apartment, a hell of a phone, etc., but this expression is more vulgar than d’enfer and so belongs to a different level of language.
