Well hello, dear friends! Thank you for joining me for this new episode of the Authentic French podcast. Sorry, I'm touching the microphone. It's a basic rule, you never touch the microphone when you're recording, so sorry about that. Today, we're going to study together the meaning of a French idiomatic expression which is "to sell your soul to the devil".
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But today, we're going to discover together the expression, as I said, "to sell one's soul to the devil." And as usual, we do it in three stages. First, I explain to you the meaning of the words taiwan whatsapp number data that make up the expression. Then, we study the meaning of the expression and we see some examples. So we're going to start, and of course, at the end, we do a little practice of pronunciation and it helps you, this practice, to reinforce your learning even more.
So this expression, "to sell one's soul to the devil", is already composed of the verb "to sell", which means to give something for money. It is the opposite of buying. Here, I am on a desk, there are pens. If I take a pen and I sell it to you, well you will take the pen, and in exchange, you will give me money. Besides, this pen, I bought it, that is to say I gave money and I was given the pen, so we are doing business. Selling.
The "soul" is very complicated to explain in a few moments, but it is a spiritual principle of existence outside the body, that is to say it is quite religious and very spiritual, but in any case we say that the soul is the part of us that is not our body. It is not something that we can see, touch, it is something that exists but is not an integral part of the body. Moreover, we say that when someone dies, well their soul remains, their soul does not die.
And the "devil" is almost the opposite of God. It's a fallen angel, it's an angel that has been sent away. A synonym is the word "demon." And basically, the devil is the spirit of evil.
So you see that this expression, "selling one's soul to the devil", we can already understand it, because it has no hidden meaning. In fact, it comes from certain beliefs from the Middle Ages. At that time, religion was even more important than it is today in fact. Everything was governed by religion. And people thought that one could obtain certain material or financial advantages by promising one's soul to the devil. So we imagine here that the devil, he bought people's souls in exchange for gifts. People said to themselves: "If I become someone... a bad person, I might still get gifts, if I sold my soul to the devil".
And today, this expression is used in a very similar sense since it means "to go beyond a great moral value for a significant financial or material counterpart". So in fact, we privilege a strong financial value over morality, we do something in our personal interest even if we know that it is not moral, that it is not good. This is what "selling one's soul to the devil" means.