Today’s vocabulary items are brought to you by the Netflix series Marseille (Gérard Depardieu is the coke-snorting mayor of the notorious southern port town–shenanigans ensue) and by the bakery where I usually stop for a coffee, a viennoiserie, and a cigarette before tackling the hill that I have to walk up to get to the lab. I worry that many or most of the words that I learn from Marseille are words that I probably shouldn’t be using in public, but what’s a monolingual American to do? The bakery vocabulary brings out some subtleties of rye bread that I never would have imagined. You’ll notice a couple blanks, as there are a couple of words or expressions that I wasn’t sure how to translate–native speakers, can you help the rest of us out?
…and, yes: I mixed them up!
Zipf's Law 
I don’t see where the blanks are, to be true . I’m wondering who the “grosse merde et un clebs” is .
A thing with Marseille is nobody could remain her Mayor without any relationship with the Mafia . It started at least during the Nazi occupation,one of Marseille Corsican gangsters organizations, lead by the Guerini brothers, chose to help the Resistance while the legendary future Mayor, Gaston Deferre, a Social-Democrat militant was a resistance important member . The Guerinis drew a solid prosperity from their involvement, getting pals with Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky to create the famous French Connection, and the young Deferre did too hey, becoming and remaining Marseille Mayor forever, well until his death . Marseille is nearly a fantasy novel city for real ! But not only for her gangsters aspect . Marcel Pagnol’s autobiographic trilogy starting with “La Gloire de mon Père” was the first reason why I started dreaming of Marseille as a kid, and hella French too, I know it .
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I speak bread pretty fluently courtesy of many hours with Didier in my first village in France and carrying that forward as an area of rare confidence here in Grenoble. I know nothing about anything criminal. I swear it judge 😉
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Mmm … why do you feel the need for claiming this last sentence so fast ?
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That would be telling, officer 👮
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BTW, what was the last known address of this Didier ?
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I don’t recall him ever giving me an address ….
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