c'est bateau -what does it mean in conversation

[yong leong]

C'est bateau -  what does it mean in a conversation.  Does it means it is not a good idea or something like that.

[Erwan]

It means it's unoriginal.

[Neil Coffey]

There's an interesting English expression: you can say "that's old hat". Not sure where the expression comes from...!

 

(I suppose "bateau" maaaay come from the similar-sounding "(re)battu".)

[yong leong]

Thank you both of you for the explanation. That's a strange expression.

Did you know that the english language was one of the dialects spoken in London during the early century and it became important due to the trade.  If you read the book called "Mother Tongue" by an author called Cyrstal something can't remember his name now.

   And English language spelling was compiled and a dictionary was written to keep the correct standard english language sometime in the 18 century. So it was quite late. Before that there were different spelling, some with one t some with a double t and things like that.

     I don't know what happened to the french language. Was it a dialect as well I wonder.

[lauris]

It seems that the french language was not a dialect, but more a alteration of the latin (brought by the Romans in the now-french territory) made by the local gaul tribes.
This first version of the language was called "langue d'oïl".

 

Not exactly related, but I like the fact : if you go to East Canada, in Quebec, they speak french too. But this local french is directly inherited from the first colon arrived in the area in the 17th century. So they kept all the idioms and expressions from that epoch, and added their owns since (and words directly translated from english as well).