For some reason Hannah and I have this weird thing where we use American pronunciations when we're talking about food. I think it's partly because she watches so much Rachel Ray on cable and partly because culinary terms seem to include a particularly high proprtion of words which are said very differently on different sides of the Atlantic. Hence ( Read more... )

From time to time I write to the OED. It's not like a penpal thing, that would be awful. But I do keep a list of words which interest or confuse or delight me when I read - because, as we've learned, I am twelve kinds of sad when it comes to such things - and occasionally I come across ante- or post-datings which I like to pass on to people as ( Read more... )

Two French colleagues asked me to arbitrate in an argument today about whether or not unproper "is a word" (after it was used in an interview by a UN spokesman, whose first language was not English).

Probably, I guessed - and then ten minutes later I suddenly remembered, as one does, that great line from Othello about how ‘there's millions now alive ( Read more... )

(Hurrah, we finally have internet in our new flat!)

I've just read Nabokov's Transparent Things, a novel, or novella really, from the 70s, a first edition of which I found in a weird secondhand-bookshop-cum-tearoom round the corner from me run by an old woman from Omaha.

I was sent on a massive word-hunt by this sentence near the end:

On the ( Read more... )

I feel like I might have posted about this before, but I just read another example and it made me jump. So, here are a few sentences to read:

Her camera hews so closely to his world view that you become fully immersed in his sadness. - The New Yorker

She struck me as someone who had hewed to the line of her own ambition without sacrificing crucial ( Read more... )

Notes to myself on semantics of the French word dérober, in the hope that I don't have to keep looking it up EVERY GODDAMN TIME, with examples from Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris.

The root meaning (from Germanic, related to English rob) is ‘to steal’ (construed with à to indicate ‘from’):

... quand il fut sûr, bien sûr qu'elle n'y était plus, que c'en ( Read more... )

This could be my last morning in Shayne's flat.  Hannah arrives in Paris today - all our things from England are packed up and being held indefinitely by a removal company until we find an apartment for them to be moved into.  I was out last night and didn't get in until after 4am, so I am sitting here at my desk, grateful for a brief burst of wifi ( Read more... )

There is a great photo in today's Le Monde magazine concerning Nabokov's Lolita and its reception in France. I really wish I could post it but I don't have a scanner here and I can't find a copy on teh interwebz. It's from 5 July 1960 and shows a group of actresses protesting in front of the Académie Française - not about the book's content but ( Read more... )

English and French both lost their early words for ‘rabbit’ because they sounded rude, and replaced them with words for ‘baby rabbit’.

The source of the problem, in both cases, was the Old French word coniz, which became French connin and also, thanks to the Norman invasion, English coney.1

Now coney (or cony) is usually pronounced to rhyme with ‘ ( Read more... )

I wonder how old the idea of werewolves is. I guess I could check this sort of thing online, but really, does every train of thought have to end in Wikipedia now?

I ask because I'm reading Marie de France at the moment. She is very interesting and very readable, and one of her lais, ‘Bisclavret’, is about what we would call a werewolf, and was ( Read more... )