i am sparticus: French Guessing Games

French Guessing Games

I was okay at French at school; I had an extra year to everyone else and so I got put into a higher set for GCSE's and coasted through with out too much work. Most of the time I couldn't be bothered to do the vocabulary learning though, and so instead I just made up feasible french sounding words. Many was the time the teacher told me off for taking English word and french-izing them, apparently the ability to say English things with a French accent won't get you by in France, or more importantly, get you an A in your exams. It goes both ways though, the best way of dealing with a French word that you don't know the meaning of is treat it like an English word you've never heard of before and guess at it from what it sounds like. Of course, the vast majority of the time this will fail miserably, but then occasionally it'll work out ok and you won't look like a fool and that, is something to treasure.

Anyway, I was sitting at my Grandma's house the other day playing games on my laptop while the rest of the family was doing the typical post-Christmas Walley family thing of reading the books they just got. My dad has this book on the history of France (get him) and obviously gets to a really amusing bit, because he chortles and stops reading. He lowers his book and says (and I apologise Dad for paraphrasing here) "Get this, Moliere wrote a musical called 'les malade imaginaire' and he..." "The imaginary duck?" interrupt I, confident of my French translation skills and ovewhelmed by the idea of a musical based on a duck that doesn't exist. To which he replies, "No, 'The Imaginary Illness' obviously, malade coming from the French word mal, meaning sick". Which just goes to show that trying to be clever by pretending that you know French doesn't work.

In case you're wondering, the punchline to the amusing anecdote about the French musical writer and the duck is that he died during the fourth performance of his new musical. Which is, if I don't say so myself, rasserener ironiquement (that is; to regain ones serendipity ironically).

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