Do you know this term - and cliché - for a French  brother-in-law?

As a sometime translator I am both wary of, and fascinated by, French words that do not have an obvious equivalent in English. 

Listening to the radio a while ago, I came across a particularly good example: beauf (not to be confused with boeuf/beef). It is used mostly pejoratively to mean a particular type of typical French man. 

It began as an innocent contraction of beau-frère (brother-in-law) that first appeared in comic book art in the 1970s. From there, it gradually hopped into general parlance (it made the dictionary in 1988); but what it means depends on who is using it and why. 

It is, I stress, an expression of prejudice. 

What is meant by beauf, by those throwing around the word with disdain, can be best summed up as a typical working-class man who wears a beret or baseball cap and either a white Marcel vest or a T-shirt carrying a message about the size of his member. 

He smokes unashamedly, hunts, enjoys pigging out on red meat and rants in bars over glasses of Ricard or vin ordinaire about the state of the world. He is narrow-minded, petty, conservative, gross and shamelessly chauvinistic.

Mostly, he can be identified by the lament mais… on ne peut plus dire ça (“but you can’t say that anymore”) which he uses as a prelude to an extended racist, misogynist or otherwise bigoted remark, with the insinuation that lefty-liberals are denying him his right of free speech.

What became clear as I asked my friends about this word is that everyone thinks they know what it means but no one can define it precisely. That makes it very difficult to render in English without seeming to add my share of judgement. 

The relevant forum on wordreference.com dedicates a long page to a discussion between members as to how to say beauf to a British or US audience.

It cannot be translated exactly because it is a French phenomenon. 

Differing contexts require differing words – which is why we still need human translators. 

To explain what a beauf is to an English speaker I would have to start with words like hick, redneck, oaf, bumpkin or yokel – but none of them quite encapsulate what my friend Arielle delightfully refers to as the quality of beaufitude. 

I suppose the only reason I am telling you all this is that I am confident neither I nor anyone I know is a beauf – to which you might wryly respond: “How can you be so sure?”

There is a popular saying that skewers this and all forms of prejudice: on est toujours le beauf de quelqu’un (“everyone is a beauf to someone”). 

It is easy to list characteristics of people we disagree with or disapprove of, but all it does is expose our own vanity and poverty of consciousness.

I am happy to finish this lexical snapshot with a report that some people now stake a pride in what snotty intellectuals and elitists find so amusing. 

In her recent book, Ascendant Beauf, the blogger Rose Lamy insists that beauf is a dangerously misleading stereotype fuelled by snobbery; and so what if you find yourself fitting the definition. 

“It takes all sorts to make a world,” my parents used to remind me when I was tempted to mock someone. 

Would we want all French people to think and act alike, according to a canon of correctness? Not me, for sure.