July and the contrepet

And here we go, here comes the month of July and with it, the shaved swimsuit, frivolity, rosé, and I will add the contrepet to this summer list.

You are beginning to see that I always like to suggest that you add formulas that we no longer think of enough…so “For July and your drunken evenings, think of contrepets”. It looks like an ad from the 50s… The contrepet? What's this ? What's this ? … The contrepet is the art of inventing contrepèteries and resolving them; that is to say, to play by permuting certain phonemes or syllables of a sentence to obtain a new one, presenting another meaning, often indecent.

Here we go, we start with a very simple example and a so-called "Belgian" counterpoint, - as the joke - "it's nice and hot" which becomes "it's necessary hot and nice"... see? It's simple... Of course things get more complicated afterwards.

Precision. There are three large families of contrepèteries; classic contrepèteries – which relate to consonants, divided into single or double consonants, inside or at the beginning of words…; the decadent contrepèteries which focus on vowels with still other subdivisions – which I spare you here – and the irregular contrepèteries which mix everything up a bit…

the art of the contrepet in July deserves to be assiduously studied... Your best teacher will be Rabelais, who from the 16th century delighted with his famous "mad woman of the mass" which became "soft woman of the buttocks"... there are had many others, from Balzac to Hugo, via Barjavel or Boris Vian… illustrious men like to play and reverse.

For your vacation notebooks I will let you solve this appropriate definition "the art of shifting the sounds that our mouths produce"!