Entries tagged with "english"
Don't need no hateration, hypenatin' in this dancery
posted by srah on December 6, 2007 5:03 PM
I recently read this New York Times article about name-changing after marriage (I especially liked the anecdote¹ about the couple who played a softball game - his family vs her family - for naming rights to the family). I read the readers' comments afterwards and now I mostly just want to exterminate all human life on earth. It drove me up the wall that so many people were advocating for people to hypenate their names. Actually, it annoyed me an equal amount when people complained about hypenating names. I have never hypenated anything in my life. This is because (no...
Err...
posted by srah on March 6, 2006 5:31 PM
Tags: english
How do you pronounce the word "err", as in "the action done by humans, as opposed to the divine act of forgiveness"? I pronounce it one way, but I heard it a different way on the radio. Dictionary.com informs me that one was accepted as correct but the other is gaining ground, to the point where both are now acceptable. Just wondering what the average pronunciation of my readers is......
The word is trouvé
posted by srah on May 5, 2003 7:05 AM
Tags: english, french, translation
Renata, a correspondance is called a connection or a connecting flight in English. Someday we will master English again....
Looking for a word
posted by srah on March 26, 2003 8:51 AM
Tags: english
Is there a word for being against an entire nation? I mean, French jokes or anti-American comments aren't racist, per se, and ethnocentrism is about holding your own ethnic group (if "American" or "French" can be considered as such) higher than all others, not about insulting a particular one. Nationalism to me is more like being a Basque and wanting your own country. I can't find the word that I want, but we really should have one......
Vichy soie
posted by srah on March 10, 2003 12:57 PM
Did you know that vichy is the French name for the fabric we call gingham? That makes me wonder if we used to call it vichy ourselves, and the name got changed during WWII, like calling sauerkraut "victory cabbage" or German shepherds "Alsatians"....
Sarah, with an English R
posted by srah on February 21, 2003 9:05 AM
Tags: assistantship, english, food, srahfam, teaching, teaching restaurant
I was a bit concerned about taking The Fam to the restaurant gastronomique yesterday because it is exam period and the students would be graded on their service. I didn't want to make it more difficult or stressful for them, so I considered cancelling our reservation, but their service teacher, M. Merlino, wanted butts in seats, so we came. Our server was E. I don't know why I feel like I need to protect his anonymity when I never do with any of my other servers in the resto gastro, but voilà. He handed us the menu and I started...
Open letter to my native tongue
posted by srah on January 16, 2003 10:45 AM
Tags: english, flooble, french, open letters
Dear English, Please get a word that translates ranger more effectively than to clean up by putting things in their place rather than by dusting and scrubbing. I think you are in desperate need of one and if you don't come up with one soon, I'm going to create one. I'm thinking "flooble", as in "I'm going to flooble the chairs in here." Whaddya think?...
Pourquoi ça, guv'nor?
posted by srah on December 12, 2002 6:54 AM
Tags: assistantship, english, french
Sometimes I wonder where the French get things from. I have a feeling that England shipped over a boatload of Cockneys to teach English to the French at some point in their history, and that it's stuck. I understand that French Hs are silent, but I can't explain why so many French people have a tendency to pronounce Hs at the beginning of words that start with vowels, in the manner of "In 'Artford, 'Ereford and 'Ampshire, 'urricanes 'ardly Hever 'appen."...
Je ne sais pas que idioma wo am speaking de temps en temps
posted by srah on September 22, 2002 1:15 PM
Tags: assistantship, chinese, english, french, language, spanish
With 22 years of English, 10 years of French, 1 year of Spanish, and 1 semester of Mandarin Chinese, my mind is a big linguistic muddle sometimes. I was showing my Chile pictures to Françoise last night and would switch to Spanish whenever I said a Spanish place-name, although I pronounced the Spanish place-name à la française. When I was talking to the other Srah and other Morins would enter the room, I would try to speak to them in English. When I took Chinese and didn't know the Chinese word, it would come out in English. When I'm on...
srah and her words, part deux
posted by srah on August 7, 2002 2:08 PM
Tags: english, french, language, spanish
In French (feuilles) and Spanish (hojas), a piece of paper is a "leaf". In English (in the U.S. at least), we have loose-leaf paper, but for the most part, we call individual pieces of paper "sheets". Which is the same word we use for bed-coverings. We're funny like that. I wonder why we don't call them leaves....
I hate hate HATE
posted by srah on January 11, 2002 1:50 PM
I hate hate HATE the phrase "true that", meaning "that's true". In our little international community, phrases and expressions seem (moreso that in an all-native-English-speaking community) to catch on with one person and suddenly be tossed around by everyone. I would like that one to be tossed somewhere else, please....
Another
posted by srah on January 10, 2002 6:36 PM
Another (oh god!) aspect of this is when people split them and create the word "nother", as in "a whole nother thing". My friend Cheryl told me what this is called, but I forgot. El Patito complains when he asks me a question ("What is your first name?") and I say "I forget." Yeah, so it's not correct, and I should probably say "I forgot". My sassy answer is usually that this is just one instance in my ongoing state of forgetfulness. Does everyone do this? Is this a weird srah thing or a weird Michigan thing or a weird...
I'm so chatty today
posted by srah on December 13, 2001 9:46 AM
Tags: english
I'm so chatty today. Do you ever wish we Unitedstatesians (so many people get bothered by us taking over two continents, I've decided to be Unitedstatesian today, or at least until I forget. Denis called me "étatsunisienne", which sounds sort of like tunisienne, which is sort of cool. Tangent!) pronounced the letter Z "zed", like everyone else in the world, instead of "zee"? I do. Random thoughts in the middle of random thoughts are very confusing....
No tengo ganas
posted by srah on December 9, 2001 3:57 PM
Tags: english, french, language, spanish
No tengo ganas de estudiar. Spanish (and French in some cases) words often tend to have es- where we only have s-, like in España (you know how long it took me to find the ñ on the Chilean-keyboard-setup? too long.) vs. Spain and estudiar vs. study. Alex overcompensates for this and comes up with words like skimo. Veddy cute. As I was saying, no tengo ganas de estudiar. Je n'ai pas envie d'étudier. I don't feel like studying....
I got an email
posted by srah on December 1, 2001 5:24 PM
Tags: english, french, john hannah, language
I got an email from a French John Hannah fan (yes, they exist!) today so I replied in French. She just wrote me back, saying that if I hadn't said I was American, she would have thought I was just a mis-typing French person. Things like that make me feel warm and sunny. Why is American both an adjective and a noun, but you can't say "a French" or "a Chinese" or "an English"? In French, the adjective and noun are always the same. It's easier. I don't like having to add "person". Weird - you can say "the French"...
