Why ‘a slice of music’ is normal in French
In one of our French chats earlier this week, Guillaume and Dominique are in a night club. Dominique likes the music there. She says:
This word she uses, morceau (plural morceaux), what is it?
It’s quite possible that you have never seen morceau before. And even if you have, it probably was in a completely different context with a completely different meaning: it means slice or piece, typically of food:
Qui veut un morceau de gâteau? Who wants a piece of cake?
Donnez-moi trois morceaux de saumon. Give me three pieces of salmon.
But here, Dominique uses it to mean a “slice” of music, as a slang word for track, tune, song.
This is as new to me as it probably is to you. As you know, the chats on Native Dialogs are generated by an AI. So when this sentence came out of the generator I was suspicious at first, thinking this may be one of those occasions where the AI hallucinates something that doesn’t exist. But no, it does exist. The dictionaries confirm that the word really does have this meaning, and it isn’t too hard to find real-world examples of it being used in this sense.
So, there we have it: un morceau, a slice of a cake and a “slice” of music!
