If you’ve ever studied abroad, or even just daydreamed about taking a vacation to a foreign land, you know that learning the language comes with the territory. Belly’s Parisian adventures in The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 3 have portrayed that in a super relatable way. Viewers have watched Belly go from struggling with her French to having full-blown conversations with Parisians. But there was one moment that particularly stood out to viewers: When Taylor came to visit in Episode 10, she called Belly pute — like, multiple times. Clearly, it’s a dirty word in French (it is Taylor, after all) — but what does pute mean in English? Brace yourselves…
Obviously, there’s a difference between what you learn in your French 101 classes (or those Duolingo exercises you’ve been trying to squeeze in) and actually immersing yourself in a new language — and clearly, Belly is doing the latter. That means she’s picking up on all the slang and swear words that you’d never see in a textbook. Where you would see pute, however, is on a site like Urban Dictionary, which is apparently exactly where Taylor found it as she was doing some research on her way to visit Belly for New Year’s.
Belly and Taylor never reveal what pute actually means on the show, but you can guess from context clues what it probably means. However, if you’re someone who needs a definite answers (guilty!), you’ve come to the right place. According to Urban Dictionary, pute is a French word for wh*re or b*tch — so basically, it’s a derogatory comment aimed primarily at women. It’s actually a shortened version of the word putain, which can also be used as an exclamation, similar to the word f*ck in English.
Of course, in the context, Taylor isn’t actually insulting Belly by calling her a pute — she’s using it in the affectionate way some friends call each other slurs in English (a reclaiming of the term, if you will). Just keep in mind, not everyone is comfortable being called slurs — in any language, even if it’s in an affectionate way. And even if you’re sure your bestie wouldn’t mind (or even that she’d enjoy) you calling her a pute as a joke, be mindful of when and where you’re saying it — it *is* a pretty dirty word, after all.