The Truth

Cool Hand Looc is a band of experienced rock musicians, based in the Poitou-Charente / Limousin region of France, who play melodic country-rock music, using material by legendary artists such as Bob Dylan, Crosby Stills & Nash, the Eagles, the Traveling Wilburys, Neil Young and Crowded House.

As for verlan, well, it’s verlan: backwards slang for the word l’envers, which means backwards. To make a word in verlan, you cut the original word in two (or three) and put the last syllable first and first syllable last (if there’s a third or fourth syllable, they go in the middle). Verlan’s been around since at least the 1930s – some say much longer, and they’re probably right – but started becoming popular in the 1970s. It began in the Paris suburbs – mostly in the housing projects inhabited by low income, and often immigrant families (called les cités, or técis in verlan). So a lot of the first words in backwards slang were the ones being used by teenagers in the projects, often relating to drugs, sex and crime and, like a lot of slang, meant to be incomprehensible to outsiders. In the 80s and 90s, verlan was a mainstay of early French rap. (Say what you will; some of it is downright kyfun.) So, in verlan a rotten (pourri) cop is called a ripou, an Arab is a beur (and flipped again to become a robeu), a Frenchman becomes a céfran, une femme (woman) a meuf, fête becomes teuf, vas-y (go!) is zyva, and barjot (slang, originally meaning naïve & bourgeois, later signifying just plain crazy) becomes the spit-collecting word jobard. And where would we be without those ? One-syllable words are simply pronounced backwards in the main: fou (nuts) becomes ouf, and cool becomes looc, as in......

Cool Hand Looc

So there you are.

"sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand"