Source: Alamy

Quelle horreur: ¡®your mother in a leopard-skin G-string¡¯ is a renowned French insult

News that a group of Swedish scientists had been planting Bob Dylan song titles into papers had other academics emailing each other with similar challenges. That was until it transpired that one Swiss-French professor had already gone far further ¨C with a reference to mothers in leopard-print G-strings.

Denis Duboule, professor in developmental genomics at the University of Geneva and the ?cole Polytechnique F¨¦d¨¦rale de Lausanne, told Times Higher Education that the story began in the mid 1990s when a French postdoc in his lab discovered a new genetic technique.

¡°As usual when you end up with a nice technique you think people will use, we started to think of an acronym. You have to visualise these French postdocs thinking about it over a Friday beer,¡± Professor Duboule said. An unspecified number of bottles later they settled on TAMERE, which supposedly stands for ¡°targeted meiotic recombination¡±. But, in popular French parlance, ta m¨¨re is shorthand for nique ta m¨¨re (fuck your mother), a phrase also associated at the time with French rap group NTM.

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¡°When I am in the US listening to talks and I hear people saying they have used the technique TAMERE it is hilarious. But I would never dare say it in front of a French-speaking audience,¡± said Professor Duboule. Popular slang use of ta m¨¨re later became more elaborate, the most insulting version being ¡°ta m¨¨re en string panthere¡± (your mother in a leopard-skin G-string).

So some years later, when another publishable genetic technique was invented, a French postdoc was determined to call it STRING ¨Cwhich supposedly stood for ¡°sequential targeted recombination-induced genomic approach¡±. Then a third postdoc called a technique PANTHERE, which was deemed to signify ¡°pangenomic translocation for heterologous enhancer reshuffling¡±.

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Professor Duboule¡¯s ¡°one regret¡± is that, unlike the first two, the last technique was rejected by the high-profile journal Nature Genetics: ¡°I couldn¡¯t explain to the editor why I really wanted it to be there!¡±

However, the techniques were united in July in a paper he co-authored called ¡°The genetics of murine Hox loci: TAMERE, STRING, and PANTHERE to engineer chromosome variants¡± that appeared in Methods in Molecular Biology.

Professor Duboule said that he had also inserted other jokes in his papers, partly as a reaction to his sense that science was becoming over-policed by committees deciding ¡°what is interesting and not interesting. And at some point you think: ¡®Nique ta m¨¨re!¡¯ Let us do what we enjoy doing ¨C having fun.¡±

paul.jump@tesglobal.com