One area of French living that does not concern the school language learner is le coût de la vie (the cost of living) – today a subject never far from the lips of many residents of France, whether expat or native.
While this phrase was familiar, I had no ideally what the word thune meant or, truth be told, how it was spelled. I always presumed it was ‘tune’ – without the h – and that it had some kind of musical connotation. This is a kind of linguistic ‘false friend’.
A five-franc coin
Actually the word thune dates back to the early 17th Century when it was used in slang to refer to alms (aumône in French) – money, food, or other goods donated to the needy.
It wasn’t until the early 19th Century that it took on the popular meaning of the five-franc coin.
Today it has morphed fully into a general slang term for money that can be used in informal contexts with friends and close family members.
‘Sans thune’ an alternative way of indicating that you are broke or skint. Actually the ‘h’ is in fact sometimes omitted in writing but this is a modern evolution.
A deeper etymological dive reveals that thune is derived from the Latin ‘tutor’, meaning "to protect or be protected”.
Conversely if you are ‘loaded’ you might be referred to as being ‘pété de thunes’, or the delightfully sounding, if inelegant ‘richissime’ – ie filthy rich.
Given that five francs from days of yore would today be worth only a few centimes, you would need a big pile of thunes to become rich.
