I just saw this strip of The far side, where a duck says how its wife just say “quack quack quack” in the morning and “quack quack quack” in the night, instead of “blah blah blah”.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
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      2 days ago

      English here. One of the few things I remember from my French lessons was a comic where one character said it «… et patati, et patata.»

      I forget where in France that was supposed to be. We’d moved on from the Tricolor books set in La Rochelle (west coast) at that point, I think, but it might still have been there.

        • dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net
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          2 days ago

          That sounds like a cognate of the (American) English usage “potato, potato” (but pronounced poh-TAY-toe, poh-TAH-toe) to indicate the lack of distinction between two items that have been presented as different.

          • palordrolap@fedia.io
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            17 hours ago

            It’s more likely cognate with the word “patter”, or at the very least, a parallel development from the same underlying onomatopoeia. Nothing to do with spuds.

            The emphasis is on the last syllable of each, “e-pata-TI, e-pata-TA”.