Archive for the ‘Languages’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

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 »

Memory, fragile and pliable

November 4, 2025

It’s about two memories of mine.

One is from decades ago, about a phone call from Monique Serpette Transue, my man Jacques’s mother, confessing that her mother had pushed her into having the infant J baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, weeping that she had done something awful to J’s soul (fiercely anti-clerical, Monique was startlingly ignorant of the beliefs and practices of the church she didn’t adhere to). Or so I recalled the event in a 2022 posting.

The other is from reports in 2016 and 2025 of a 1970 visit to the linguistics program at what was then the University College of North Wales in Bangor, which had several members with the same, characteristically Welsh, name.

As I write here every few weeks, memory is fragile and undependable; from the beginning, in which our very perceptions are selective and skewed, influenced by expectation and experience, and then through years of fragmentation and loss and further skewings and extraneous intrusions from a host of sources; our memories are not only fragile, but also pliable. If we tell the same story every time — hardly anyone does — that’s because we’re producing a memorized performance (and it’s probably inaccurate). If we’re dead certain that we have the facts right, we’re almost surely getting them wrong. The literature is immense, and sobering.

So: two examples, with reflections on them.

(more…)

Posted in Memory, My life, This blogging life, Welsh | 6 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 »

entre más carne mejor

October 3, 2025

More from the annals of commercial names, thanks to this Facebook report from Steven Levine, on the road in Asbury Park NJ:

On the way to Ocean Grove NJ for a weekend with some friends, our culinary tour of the Jersey Shore, I passed this sign:


(#1) The Meat & More Corporation of Asbury Park: a butcher shop, noted here for its double entendre name

(more…)

Posted in Double entendres, Jokes, Language and food, Spanish, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a 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 »

Shimmer is both a floor wax AND a dessert topping

August 24, 2025

I’m barely getting through my days, but now suddenly there are five new things on my plate (and dozens of other postings I’ve failed to follow up on). I’ve picked the thing of most immediate interest, since it follows up on my posting yesterday “Yo soy Johnny Peso”, where I wrote about this cartoon:

(#1)

In the 8/22 Bizarro strip, Wayno presents us with Johnny Peso, an intricately constructed Mexican-Spanish and Mexican-culture counterpart  to Johnny Paycheck as a performer on the Grand Ole Opry stage. If you don’t know about Johnny Paycheck and the Grand Ole Opry, you’re doomed; the cartoon will be incomprehensible. If you know who they are, you’ll get the joke; and the more you know about them, the more you’ll see in Wayno’s cartoon (I suspect there are still more things that I’ve missed). And then there’s a lot to say about the way Johnny Peso introduces himself [with the stiff and Englishy yo soy Johnny Peso].

Then came the objections. In a Facebook comment from David Preston and this blog comment from Geoff Nathan:

— GN: Are you sure it isn’t a reference to Johnny Cash?

— AZ > GN: A point also made on Facebook by David Preston. Yes, surely peso is a rough (metonymic) translation of cash, so Johnny Peso would be a Mexican Johnny Cash. But I made a case in this posting that Johnny Peso is a Mexican Johnny Paycheck. The answer is that in the world of cultural allusion, both things can be true. I’ll expand on this idea in a separate posting [the one you’re reading right now].

Shimmer is both a floor wax AND a dessert topping.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Identities, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Spanish, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Yo soy Johnny Peso

August 23, 2025

In the 8/22 Bizarro strip, Wayno presents us with Johnny Peso, an intricately constructed Mexican-Spanish and Mexican-culture counterpart  to Johnny Paycheck as a performer on the Grand Ole Opry stage. If you don’t know about Johnny Paycheck and the Grand Ole Opry, you’re doomed; the cartoon will be incomprehensible. If you know who they are, you’ll get the joke; and the more you know about them, the more you’ll see in Wayno’s cartoon (I suspect there are still more things that I’ve missed). And then there’s a lot to say about the way Johnny Peso introduces himself. The cartoon:


(#1) The joke in the cartoon comes the two bilingual puns: Spanish peso punning on English paycheck, Spanish olé punning on English vernacular ole; the puns are, in addition, what I’ve called (semiotically) satisfying puns (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

And then there’s a lot more.

(more…)

Posted in Bilingualism, Clothing, Hats, Interjections, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Names, Puns, Spanish, Understanding comics | 7 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »