All Sorts of Bidets

Having a small child in the house has introduced me to the weird and wonderful world of French nursery rhymes. In English, I've so far avoided the ones about about cutting the tails off visually impaired rodents and dying of the plague, but SCB was given a musical book of French children's songs which included this little gem:

A cheval sur mon bidet,
Quand il trotte il fait des pets,
Au pas, au pas, au pas,
Au trot, au trot, au trot,
Au galop, au galop, au galop!

Il a tant galopé
Qu'il est tombé sur le nez!

For which a rough translation would be:

Riding on my little horse/bidet,
When he trots he farts,
Walking, walking, walking,
Trotting, trotting, trotting,
Galloping, galloping, galloping,

He galloped so much
He fell down on his nose!

Intrigued by the scatological references, I did a quick search on Wordreference.com and discovered that bidet is an old-fashioned word for a horse. There is even a whole discussion thread related to whether the bathroom furnishing is named because of the position one adopts when using it, and whether the wordplay was intentional when the song was invented. 

I'm not sure how I feel about singing along with that one now!

Unlocking le franglais

Back in 2003, I returned from France to the UK and wanted to use the phone I had bought in France with my UK SIM card. I had to phone Orange to ask for the code de déverouillage and I remember how, after a few weeks of not speaking any French at all, having previously been almost completely immersed in it, my tongue twisted around the syllables and I wondered if it was one of the hardest phrases in the language for English speakers to say.*

Fast forward to 2016 and I discover that the French must have found it too complicated as well, becasue the word used on the SFR website for unblocking a phone is now désimlocker.

Don't you love a bit of franglais?



* It's not, by the way. In my book that honour is reserved for the line "tu n'es plus du tout du tout  dans le coup" in this song.

Areu, areu

"Areu" is one of the few words that I learned through doing crosswords in French. I've been attempting for years to learn to do mots fléchés, which are more or less the equivalent of a quick (non-cryptic) crossword, although I believe the most accurate translation is actually "arrow words". In that time I have progressed from Level 1 to almost being able to do Level 2. (I was delighted when I learned that there was also a Level 1-2 category because it made me feel that I had made more progress!) As it turns out, doing synonym crosswords is a fairly useless way of learning vocabulary because you encounter the words entirely out of context and, if you cheat by looking at the answers often enough, you can learn that two words are synonyms of each other without actually knowing what either of them means.

Anyway, it turns out that even learning the word areu from the crosswords was a bit pointless, because my daughter probably says it to me a few hundred times every day. The best English translation of it is probably "goo-goo, ga-ga", but that is nothing like as onomatopoeic as the French word for that cooing noise that babies make when they're happy.

Unless, I've been wondering, it's particularly French babies who make the sound in this way. Perhaps it's being surrounded by all those rolling rrrs that makes them exercise their vocal cords like this.

I suspect probably not, but I do like my theory and I haven't spent enough time with other babies of this age to have any evidence to the contrary. Any thoughts?

A Thèque-nical Vocabulary Lesson

Bibliothèque  must surely have been one of the words on the vocabulary list for my beginner's French course when I was 12. The second year that I lived in France, I borrowed books and CDs from the médiathèque. In Italy, I learned the meaning of pinacoteca, and by extension, pinacothèque, and since living in Paris I have been to exhibitions at the cinemathèque. But it took pregnancy, an unexpected contact with an infectious disease, and a consultation with a midwife who was also not a native French speaker to teach me that the sérothèque is the place where a medical laboratory stores blood samples after they have been analysed. So if you ever need a "historical" blood test, in my case where they check whether antibodies were present before a more recent exposure to a disease, the lab can take out one of your old samples and analyse it for other things.

I was quite tickled by the idea of a lending library of blood samples, so I did a quick search to find out if there were other -thèque words missing from my vocabulary, and it turns out that the French Wiktionary has a whole list of them. A glyptothèque is a museum of engraved stones, joujouthèque is Quebec French for a collection of games, a candidathèque is a store of CVs, and a carothèque is not a collection of carrots, but a place to keep carottes glaciares, or ice samples from a glacier.

Maybe over the long weekend I'll amuse myself by seeing how many of these new words I can drop into conversation with my in-laws :-)