So, I kept hearing this French phrase, tourner dans le vide, popping up here and there. Mostly in some music I was listening to, I think? Anyway, it stuck in my head. My French is, well, pretty basic, just enough to order a coffee maybe. So, I had no real clue what it meant.
My first thought was to just translate it word for word. ‘Tourner’ – turn, ‘dans’ – in, ‘le vide’ – the void, the emptiness. So, ‘turning in the void’? Or ‘spinning in the empty’? Sounded kind of dramatic, like something from a sci-fi movie. Didn’t really feel right, didn’t seem like something people would say in a normal chat.
Trying to Figure It Out
I punched it into a couple of those online translation sites. You know how they are. Sometimes they nail it, sometimes they give you complete nonsense. The results I got were things like:
- Spinning in a vacuum
- Running in circles
- Going nowhere
- Idling (like an engine)
Okay, ‘running in circles’ and ‘going nowhere’ started to make more sense. ‘Spinning in a vacuum’ still sounded a bit weird, too technical maybe. ‘Idling’ was interesting, like a car engine running but the car isn’t moving. That felt closer.
I remembered my neighbour’s cousin, Sophie, is actually French. I caught her when she was visiting last weekend. I asked her, trying my best pronunciation, “Sophie, what does ‘tourner dans le vide’ really mean?”
She laughed a bit, probably at my accent, but then explained. She said it’s like when you’re putting in effort, you’re busy, you’re doing things, but nothing is actually happening. No progress. Like trying to screw a screw into a hole where the thread is gone – the screwdriver turns and turns, but the screw doesn’t go in or out. It just spins. That’s tourner dans le vide.
Ah, Now I Get It
So it’s not just being idle, it’s the feeling of useless effort. You’re active, but totally unproductive. Wasting energy. Spinning your wheels, like we’d say.
It made me think about this project I was stuck on a few months back. I spent weeks tweaking little details, having meetings, rewriting reports. Felt super busy, right? But looking back, none of it actually moved the project forward an inch. We were just going over the same ground again and again, stuck in pointless discussions. We were totally tourner dans le vide. Didn’t know the phrase then, but that’s exactly what it felt like.
It’s actually a pretty neat phrase. Captures that specific kind of frustration really well. Much better than just saying ‘unproductive’. It’s got that feeling of emptiness, the ‘vide’, built right into it. Yeah, I like it. Glad I figured that one out.
