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”.
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”.
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.
Oh yes, “et patati et patata” is pretty common too!
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.
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”.
We definitely say that too