In today’s lesson we’ll look at the expression for “to procrastinate” in French: Remettre au lendemain. For example, je remets mon travail au lendemain (I procrastinate my work). We’ll explain how this expression is constructed and how to use it in examples below. Keep reading!
Remettre au lendemain
to procrastinate
Expression construction
The expression for “to procratinate” is comprised of the verb remettre (to put off, to defer) followed by au (to the) and lendemain (the next/following day). The verb procrastiner does exist but this is seen as more formal language.
The grammatical stucture is: remettre + whatever it is that you’re procrastinating + au lendemain. Now, our initial example should make sense. Je remets mon travail au lendemain (literally: I defer my work to the following day).
Example sentences
Following the grammatical structure, the literal translation of our first example is: “Thomas should do his homework but he puts them off to the following day”.
In this example, the word les is a direct object pronoun meaning “them” (ses devoirs). Devrait (should) is the conditional form of devoir (must, have to).
Thomas devrait faire ses devoirs mais il les remet au lendemain.
Thomas should do his homework but he’s procrastinating.
Si tu continues à remettre toutes tes responsabilités au lendemain, tes problèmes vont commencer à s’accumuler !
If you keep procrastinating your responsabilities, your problems will start piling up.
In this example you’ll notice that both verbs continuer (to continue) and commencer are followed by the preposition à (to/at) and an infinitive.
In addition to remettre au lendemain, you can also say remettre à plus tard, with plus tard meaning “later”.
Je devrais passer l’aspirateur mais je le remets à plus tard.
I should vacuum but I’m procrastinating.
This final example uses the more formal verb procrastiner. The sentence uses the expression en train de which is used to indicate the present progressive or “-ing”.
Je ne comprends pas pourquoi la commune est toujours en train de procrastiner l’entretien des routes municipales.
I don’t understand why the town is always procrastinating the upkeep of the public roadways.
French expressions | Lessons by David Issokson
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