A daube is a delicious and hearty French stew – but this expression is not something that you would aspire to.
Why do I need to know c’est de la daube?
Because you might want to express your strong opinion on a movie/book/TV show you’ve just watched in informal but relatively polite society.
What does it mean?
C’est de la daube – pronounced say de la dob – translates as ‘it’s a piece of crap’ (rubbish, while a perfectly reasonable alternative, just doesn’t quite cut it) and is perfect for use in discussions about books, films and TV shows … there’s even a book about cinema called C’est de la daube (Chroniques de cinéma).
The phrase can also be used to describe things that have little value and can be discarded after use – or, basically, anything you want to describe as ‘crap’.
Famously, daube is a classic Provençal stew made with inexpensive beef braised in wine, vegetables, garlic, and herbes de Provence, and traditionally cooked in a daubière, a braising pan. The question, then, is how a delicious and hearty stew came to be used to describe something cheap and nasty and best avoided.
It’s thought that this phrase has its origins in the kitchen. According to Gaston Esnault in his “dictionnaire des argots”, ‘daube’ in this less-savoury context is a 19th-century word of Lyon origin to describe fruits and meat as being ‘spoiled’, applied to fruits and meats.
Notoriously, French programmers who like the Linux system often refer to Windows as Windaube…
Use it like this
C’est de la daube ce film – It’s crap, this film
Ton opinion, c’est de la daube – Your opinion is rubbish