A funny quote from President Chirac

[jrineakter]

Hello, dear friends! Thank you for joining me for this new episode of Walk with Johan. It is a great pleasure to be with you today to talk, as every week, about personal development and therefore to share with you some thoughts, some things that I learn, some things that I read, some things that I synthesize, that is to say that I will read an idea in a book, a very similar idea in another book and I will put them together and try on the one hand to apply them in my life and to share with you these experiences to help you on the one hand to practice your French but also, I hope, to help you improve your life or in any case to learn through some of my experiences.

So before we start… today, we’re going to talk about a very funny quote from a former French president… let me remind you that the openings at the Académie Français Authentique are opening soon and these will be the last registrations of the year. So if you want to join a big family, if you want to have access to a platform that gives you all the resources you need, well follow the link in the description, www.francaisauthentique.com/academie , and you will have all the information you need to join us, access the Zoom meetings with our tutors, access the modules etc. Registrations open on the 1st.

And if you follow the link in the description, you will have access to all the content or at least a description of the content of the academy and you will be able to join the waiting list. So do it now. I really think it can revolutionize your learning of French. It will be a pleasure to meet you there.

So today, we're going to talk about, as I said, a funny quote from President Jacques Chirac. Jacques Chirac was a politician. He was, as we would say in French, right-wing, that is to say, he was philippines whatsapp number data rather conservative. He died a few years ago. He was a minister, prime minister but also president of the Republic, so from 1995 to 2007.

He kept a sympathetic image in France precisely because of his frankness, you will see the quote that I will share with you, but he also gave an image of someone sympathetic, someone who came from the countryside, who liked to eat, to drink, who had a purely French spirit. Moreover, for the members of the academy who are listening to us, there is a module in the academy, it is module 8 on Jacques Chirac.

And Jacques Chirac, he once had a quote that always made me smile, he said… Be careful, it's colloquial, so you shouldn't really use it without understanding that the second word of this quote is colloquial. He said: "Trouble always flies in squadrons."

So the word "emmerde", you recognize the word "merde". Shit is excrement, what human beings get out of their bodies after eating. We take what is good and we reject what is not good. So it is a familiar word, even crude, even rather crude. And the word "emmerde" means problem, trouble. So trouble always flies in squadrons.

The verb "to fly", you understand, right? The planes in the sky fly, the birds in the sky fly.

And the word "escadrille" means a group of planes. A group of planes is a squadron.

For example, you may have already seen, on July 14, there is what is called the "Patrouille de France". It is a group of planes. We call it a squadron. It is a group of planes. In the Patrouille de France, I don't know exactly how many planes there are. But in any case, if you have a group of a few planes, four or five planes, we will say that it is a squadron.

So for President Chirac, problems, hassles, troubles, they always fly in squadrons, that means that problems always arrive in groups. There is not one problem that arrives alone, there is a set of problems that arrive, the problems arrive together. That is what he meant.

I don't know the context in which he used this little expression, but I think it must have been a time when there was a lot of bad news for the country, for France, and when he actually said that. Trouble always flies in squadrons. That means problems always come in groups, a problem never comes alone.