It’s good to know the majority of words I’ve misspelled in the recent past have been French, a language I took one class in (no, not one course, but actually a one hour-long class when I was a sophomore in college). I dropped French after the first day and signed up for philosophy instead. (Yeah, that served me well.) As they say in Springfield, “Camus can do, but Sartre is smartre.”
And I may not be able to properly spell ménage à trois (oh wait, I just did!), but I know what one smells like.... Hee hee! And dear Editor (i.e., Stephen), what other non-Francophone can not only properly spell pamplemousse but order a vegetarian pizza in the Grand (Old) Duchy of Luxembourg and a café au lait in Montreal without any problem?
Le chat est bleu right back to you! (That’s the only thing I learned during my French studies. Everything else has been picked up during covert listenings to Pimsleur tapes, a drunken night with Poles at the Noir Désir concert, conversations with pretentious academics & artists, my world(ly) travels, as well as a shared car with a stoned Frenchman on the overnight train from Prague to Warsaw).
Speak my language: Franglais!
French-English speakers have Franglais,
ReplyDeleteSpanish-English speakers have Spanglish,
Chinese-English speakers have Chinglish,
but what, WHAT I ask you, do Polish-English speakers have???
Polglish???
Hmmm, Boleslaw speaks Polecat. Maybe he would know.
ReplyDelete-Max
Ummm...I think you just wrote "The cat and blue." What does that mean really?
ReplyDeleteAnd btw, I thought you misspelled menage-a-trois on PURPOSE on my blog. Ya know, to be funny. That's the cool thing about being an over-educated, otherwise-intelligent being...you can make mistakes and people think you're just being clever. Kewl.
Lori
Hrumph!
ReplyDelete>>Over-educated, otherwise-intelligent being.
>>Clever. Kewl.
Guilty of all the above! And yet somehow still guilty of misspelling French--the only damned language on this planet that has silent Xs!
Lori, you are correct: I did write, "The cat and blue." However, what I meant (and apparantly failed at learning in my one-hour French class during the fall of 1987) was, "The cat is blue." I have thence corrected my entry. Mea culpa ... (or am I misspelling Latin now?!?!).
As for you, Miss Chrzanka: the broken, bastardized form of Polish-English (even though I'm willing to concede that Polish is already bastardized sufficiently by the Poles!) would be polgielski. There's just no other way around it: you have to use the Polish form.
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