Today’s morning name (pure playfulness after a long night of uneasy sleep fragmented by joint pain): from the Cambridge French-English dictionary, the noun
pantoufle (fem.): slipper; a loose, soft kind of shoe for wearing indoors
(#1) An array of pantoufles (from the Cambridge dictionary)
Considered as a nonsense word, it’s silly-sounding in French, or when borrowed into English as /pæntúfǝl/, which sounds like a cousin of kerfuffle.
But then the things it denotes are often indulgences — playfully pleasurable in design, material, or color (as in #1), so that the word comes with an air of the ridiculous, both in sound and in meaning.
An air that carries over to uses of pantoufle as a name. Two of which I now explore: an imaginary rabbit Pantoufle, from the world of fiction; and me as Monsieur Pantoufles, the woolly moccasins guy.
Pantoufle the rabbit. A character in the novel Chocolat; from Wikipedia:
Chocolat is a 1999 novel by Joanne Harris, which was adapted in 2000 as a film of the same name.
Set in the French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes between Mardi Gras and Easter Sunday, it follows the story of Vianne Rocher, a single mother who arrives with her six-year-old daughter Anouk to open a chocolaterie opposite the church. Their arrival coincides with the beginning of Lent, the traditional season of fasting, and scandalises Francis Reynaud, the priest, and his supporters. Tensions run high, and the community is increasingly divided between the abstinence of the Church and the indulgence of chocolate.
… Anouk [is] a precocious child with an imaginary rabbit, Pantoufle.
Je suis Monsieur Pantoufles. From my 11/13/22 posting “The news from my house”, with a note on my L.L. Bean indoor / outdoor shearling-lined suede shoes:
(#2) One moccasin / slipper / pantoufle
And then in my 5/19/23 posting “mocsnsocks”, I noted, in a photo:
my feet. In shearling-lined moccasins. (I have other shoes, but I wear these most of the time, because they keep my poor feet warm and comfortable and because they are easy for me to slip on and off — my damaged hip makes reaching down painful, and reaching all the way to the ground impossible.) And without any socks. (I have very nice socks, but putting them on is difficult, painful, and time-consuming — that hip again — so I’ve taken to going sockless.)
I am Sockless in Palo Alto, Et je suis Monsieur Pantoufles. Mister Slippers.
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