A Frog in the Valley

Question for wise wordpress hackers reading this blog…

Is there a way to specifically not show a certain category by id when calling a list of categories from the function “the_category” within the Loop?

I want to use categories to “route” post to the home page of different sections of this blog (english and french) so I am using a “lang=en” category but I would like this category to be excluded from the list of categories under the post on the home page…

It should really not be that hard but I just can't wrap my head against it. I searched the codex and googled but I can't fiend from what angle to get at this…