Archive for the ‘French’ Category

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Je suis Monsieur Pantoufles

November 19, 2025

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. (more…)

Posted in Books, Clothing, French, Morning names, Movies and tv, Names, Shoes, Silliness | Leave a Comment »

Like a Spanish cow

November 11, 2025

Very briefly noted, this morning’s morning name, the stock insult in French:

parler français comme une vache espagnole, literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’, conveying ‘to speak French badly’

I heard this first from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and our good friend Benita Bendon Campbell, It’s vivid and silly, and then English like a Spanish cow can be adapted as a critique of someone’s linguistic abilities in French or English or, I assume, any language. Cows being linguistically quite limited, and Spaniards being one of the nationalities French people are inclined to mock (though I would have expected the cow to be Italian, Dutch, or German; or of some exotic despised nationality, like Turkish or Chinese).

(more…)

Posted in Etymology, Formulaic language, French, Idioms, Insults, Morning names, Pragmatics, Stock expressions | 2 Comments »

Moments of love and joy

October 26, 2025

In Vienne en Isère 4 — “The food train rolls on”, earlier today, the train, having moved from Vienne to Texas, drew into the Neiman Marcus station at Dallas. Now, in Vienne en Isère 5, the train goes from Texas to Colorado and Montana. It is, once again, the La Marjolaine train, now on Benita Bendon Campbell’s tracks. Three comments in e-mail today from Bonnie:

— 1 A little French folk song, “ En passant par la Lorraine” — a veiled reference to Joan of Arc’s life and legends — concludes

… puisque le fils du roi m’aime… Il m’a donné comme étrenne … un bouquet de marjolaine
…s’il m’épouse, je serai reine… s’ll me quitte, je perds ma peine…

 Rough translation:

‘Since the king’s son is in love with me, he gave me a Christmas present of a bouquet of marjoram
If he weds me, I’ll be the Queen — if not, l’ll have wasted my time.’

So marjolaine may be a metaphor for great love and its risks. Point did create the recipe as a surprise for his beloved wife Mado (we did meet her!). Though it might mean ‘Hope you love this cake. If you don’t, so what?’

— 2 Ten years ago, I gave a little lecture to my French Club (le Club Sévigné) about Point and His Restaurant; I know a master pastry chef in Denver who made a Marjolaine for our traditional post-meeting tea party. Everyone was pleased.


La Marjolaine for le Club Sévigné, before being cut into slices

— 3 One evening at Mountain Sky Guest Ranch (in Emigrant MT), where I spent many riding vacations in happier days, Pam, the spectacular pastry chef there, made a Marjolaine for a dessert. I waxed eloquent about its history to my table mates. The dining manager overheard my disquisition, called the entire serving staff to come on over to my table, and asked me to tell them ALL about it. Darling kids. Not many moments I’d like to relive, but that’s one.

 

Posted in French, Language and food, Music | Leave a Comment »

A World Postcard

October 21, 2025

In my mail  yesterday, 10/20, a World Postcard Day postcard from my old friend and Stanford colleague Ryan Tamares, mailed from him (in Mountain View CA, a few miles from my place) on 9/22, to go through the World Postcard Day site in College Station TX on 10/1 (the day itself) and then wend its way to me (whether by intention or misadventure) as if had come by surface mail from the place in the card’s picture, Vienne en Isère, France (note: not the much better known Vienne en Autriche / Vienna in Austria / Wien in Österreich).

I’ll put off the occasion and its sponsoring organization to an appendix to the main posting, which is about the card itself: the town pictured in it, the shop in that town pictured in it, and its source.

(more…)

Posted in Books, Events and occasions, French, Names, Placenames | 1 Comment »

Quiche, Henri, les flics!

October 21, 2025

Gretel Cunningham Young (of Columbus OH, where she grew up, with my daughter Elizabeth, many years ago) on Facebook yesterday:


— GY: My goal was to make a half-vegetarian, half-carnivorous quiche, so I ordered this divided pan

Noting her reference to carnivorous quiche, plus an odd quirk in way English vegetarian is used, I reacted to her statement with some alarm (my response in an expanded and improved form here):

— AZ: But I don’t think I want to get near a carnivorous (‘meat-eating’) quiche, lest I be devoured by it. vegetarian quiche has the adjective vegetarian ‘(of food or diet), plant-based, excluding meat’, not the noun vegetarian ‘(of people) a vegevore, someone who eats only plant-based food; a non-carnivore, someone who does not eat meat’. A quiche that’s a vegetarian would not be a threat to me (as a being made of meat), but it would nevertheless be creepy, in a cannibalistic sort of way. The meaty correspondent to vegetarian quiche ‘quiche for vegetarians’ would be quiche for carnivores.

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, French, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Puns, Semantics of compounds, Silliness, Slogans | 1 Comment »

Putain ouais!

September 9, 2025

(Swearing in French, and English, so not to everyone’s taste)

Today’s Bizarro strip, in which Wayno shows us what goes on in a lower education classroom:


MonkeyJack (as I’l call him) asks the question, expecting the answer, in chorus: Fuck, yeah! To which he will tell them all to shout it out the way he does, loud and clear: Putain ouais! (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

But then there’s Wayno’s title, a play on higher education (sometimes known as tertiary or post-secondary ed): this semi-technical term has higher ‘closer to the high end, the top of something’ (of formal education here, so referring to university education); and it’s opposed to K-12 education, referring to school education, that is, primary and secondary ed. Though lower ‘closer to the low end, the bottom of something’ is the opposite of spatial higher, lower education seems rarely if ever used to refer to K-12 ed.

Then lower education becomes available for play, using one of the other senses of low. And if we’re going down there, might as well go raunchy, so we get low as a rough synonym of louche ‘disreputable, sordid’, the opposite of high ‘morally or culturally superior’ — and lower education, an education in the seamier side of things, in vulgarity, like swear words. And swear words in French, ’cause everyone knows everything’s dirtier in French.

And that’s today’s quick linguistic joke. Meanwhile, life has been amazing in some ways (people said the most wonderful things about me on my 85th birthday) but almost unmanageably difficult in most ways. I am hanging on.

 

 

 

Posted in Education, French, Language play, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Morning has broken

June 7, 2025

Praise for the singing!
Praise for the morning!
— “Morning Has Broken”

Today, Saturday, awaking officially at 4:52, but lying for maybe 20 minutes in that wonderful half-waking state, with genuinely useful ideas chasing around my head, while an Istomin / Stern / Rose recording of the Brahms trios for piano. violin, and cello (for some reason, in reverse order, ending with No. 1) played on my Apple Music — fabulously passionate, exuberant in bursts, and musically complex. The Brahms is Morning A.

One thing that I worked on in my head was a kvetch from Michael Newman (on Facebook on 6/1, with a response from me) that I didn’t get to post on yesterday, because yesterday was largely a great trial, following on the events reported in my 6/5 posting “An indescribable day”. But now I will introduce Michael and show our exchange; that’s Morning B. Which comes with the promise of a future posting celebrating Michael, singing his praises.

Then, after morning cleanup, I went to my worktable, to turn off the Apple Music, check my vital signs (good), and turn on the tv to MSNBC, which immediately presented me with this panel:

Harvard University Professor Maya Jasanoff and Ankush Khardori join The Weekend to discuss why President Tr**p keeps losing in his war against the nation’s oldest college

In which I was once again impressed with Khardori, who came across as extraordinarily bright, incisive, tough and down-to-earth, and surprisingly charming. Also, to my famously queer eye, definitely sexy; he’s Morning C.

After him, Bob Eckstein’s newsletter The Bob popped up, in a special French edition yesterday, to cap things off with a wonderfully silly cartoon — Morning D.

Morning was then broken, and the day shambled on, with variously astonishing, distressing, and alarming news breaking in one wave after another.

(more…)

Posted in Academic life, French, Gender and sexuality, Language and politics, Language and the law, Linguistics in the comics, Music, My life, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

Put a red apple in that mouth

March 22, 2025

… and call it Cochon de lait rôti. Put a mouth on that green apple and call it Le fils de l’homme. Mash them together in a nightmare and you get today’s Bizarro strip, a Wayno Psychiatrist cartoon that’s a re-play of an earlier Bizarro, but with the dream figure of William Tell’s son (with an apple on his head) replaced by a roasted wild boar (with an apple in its mouth):


(#1) Surrealist René Magritte’s Son of Man on the therapist’s couch (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)

Two things here: apples in the mouths of roasted pigs (as in the patient’s nightmare); and the previous Bizarro strip (from 2022), with the same patient and the same therapist (a caricature of the artist Magritte), positioned differently in the strip, and suffering from dramatically different nightmares.

(more…)

Posted in Allusion, Art, Comic conventions, French, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Quotations, Surrealism, Switzerland and Swiss things, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

Back-accented nadir 3

February 22, 2025

A second follow-up on back-accented nadir in (American) English, now about the history of the word, whose antecedents in English include both front-accented pronunciations (as is — on the testament of dictionaries for British, American, and Australian English — standard throughout modern English) and back-accented ones (as I reported on in previous postings, with some surprise).

The questions are how English settled on front accent and where the exceptional back accent comes from, and I lack the resources to answer those questions, since the sources I have available to me provide spellings, not pronunciations, and accentuation isn’t marked in English spelling (so we have the homographic front-accented noun PRESENT and back-accented verb PRESENT). What I need is help from people who are familiar with the evidence on the accentuation of Middle French and Middle English (material that’s entirely unavailable to me; I don’t have access to a scholarly library).

(more…)

Posted in Accent, French, Language change, Latin, Pronunciation, Spelling, Variation | 2 Comments »

The Austria ostrich

November 15, 2024

Very briefly noted.

Passed on back on 11/9 by Michael Palmer on Facebook, this fine reworking of the map of Austria as an ostrich:


MP came across it on the Language Nerds Facebook site, but I don’t know who created the image in the first place

In English, Austria (a Latinization of the German name Österreich ‘eastern realm’) and ostrich (from a compound of the Latin avi- stem meaning ‘bird’ and the Greek struth– stem meaning ‘ostrich, big sparrow’) have only medial /str/ as clearly shared material, so are very distant puns, if they count as puns at all. Much the same is true of Spanish Austria and avestruz.  Things are even more distant in Italian (Austria and struzzo) and of course German (Österreich and Strauß).

But in French, as I pointed out on Facebook, by the accidents of phonological change, Latinized Austria > Autriche and the avi– + struth– compound > autruche, yielding a truly fine pun: Autriche is an autruche!

So Austria not only looks like an ostrich, in French it sounds like one too. This makes me happy.

 

Posted in Art, Compounds, French, German, Greek, Language and animals, Language change, Latin, Placenames, Puns, Spanish | 3 Comments »

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