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Queue faites-vous?
Once my professor explained that he was going to be using the word "queue" in the British sense, it was all downhill from there.
My friend-and-fellow-French-major and I had the same thought process, wherein we said to ourselves, The British sense? What other sense is there? ... Well... there's the French sense... (lock eyes, erupt in immature giggles). For you see, the French word "queue" can be a line that you stand in or it can be an animal's tail.
Oh yeah, or slang for "penis."
From then on, any mention of the penultimate entry in a list, slow or fast insertion or "Big Oh" notation would make us bite our lips and shake with unreleased laughter. Meanwhile, no one else had made the original connection that we had, so nothing sounded remotely dirty to them.
So yes, in response to the question that no one asked, graduate students are very mature. Then we had snack time.
srah - Friday, 26 March 2004 - 4:18 PM
Tags: french, my favorite posts, school of information
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Comments (3)
Rethabile Masilo - March 27, 2004 - 6:37 PM - ℓ
I think I'd have understood "standing in line" although it would have probably sounded queer (queer in the Lesotho sense of the word). We stand in a queue or we queue, it is true, but then we're so British-influenced it's hopeless -- I went to school in the States, so today I stand in line and sometimes I queue; ou je fais la queue, puisque maintenant je vie en France. All in all, it's tons of fun actually experiencing the flexibility and differences of language. Cheers.
people in south africa didn't understand me when I said "and then we stood in a line" because they ALWAYS stand in queues....