Huh, huh. Cul de Sac.

I've been catching up on back episodes of 99% Invisible, a micro-podcast about design. Roman Mars' show noted it 6 months ago, I know, and I should have known anyway but was given a foreign language education worthy of any 'Merican, which is to say, crappy, so I didn't know until this morning, but. . . .

Did you know cul de sac in French means "ass bag?" Really. Listen. I'll wait.

Well, technically it might be better called "butt of bag"; but still for me it has the same ring of disgust and insult one finds in the Spanish invective "¡Besamé cola!", or "Kiss my ass!"

I have this vision of a French developer in the States, pissed off over some anti-Gaulish slight, either real or merely perceived, developing this new-fangled suburb and throwing in a dead end-ish street (called an impasse now in France) and naming it an ass bag with enough obfuscating flourish to confuse those "stoopeed Americans!" I'd say it worked. People actually seek out these dead ends, these ass bags, these roads to nowhere as their preferred modus habilus. They want to be hooked on cars and the convenience they supposedly provide, but don't want those cars to go too fast near their homes. Duplicitous ass bags, they.

So many in the suburbs. So many turds in the ass bags.