In our current effort to develop a French semantic dictionary, we ran across the word TSOIN in two stop lists posted on the Web. It was not in my old pocket Larousse, but an online French lexicon explained that it usually appeared in the doubled form “tsoin-tsoin.” Unfortunately, it had “no official definition.”
How can an expression common enough to be included on a stop list have no meaning? At this point, contextual semantics came in to save the day. Who really needs a normative model-driven definition? We could simply apply our standard structural methods to characterize where the expression occurs.
To begin with, there is a French Wikipedia tongue-in-cheek article about the African “tsoin-tsoin fly” that carries a lethargic disease that kills a person in about twenty or thirty years. A French rock band issued an album with “tsoin-tsoin” in its title. Several bloggers or forum posters have it in their user names.
So we can infer that “tsoin-tsoin” is probably not obscene. It seems to have some negative connotations like “slacker” or “lazy,” but in a somewhat positive way. A similar English adjective would be “laidback,” and one may perhaps even say “cool.”
Actually, our sample size is much too small to make any reliable definition yet, but with more examples of its occurrence, we can eventually home in on a broadly accepted meaning. In a sense, this meaning is still being developed in popular usage; we are watching contextual semantics at work in real life.