Speaking Frog

I won a prize in French in high school--surprising at the time because I was more proficient in Latin, I believed. Some other snotnosed kid won the Latin prize, and I hated him for it.

Well, the first time I found myself on my own in Paris for a week in 1998, I discovered that almost all my school French had utterly disappeared. The only way I could order a baguette in a patisserie was to point at it and mumble something that sounded like "bag it". I was devastated.

Well, there's now a website for those of us who feel that, while French may not be the language of love, it certainly could be the language of obnoxiousness. Oddly enough, it's not written by any of us rosbifs, but by someone in Australia. Good on him, I say.

Of course, the best page of the site is here. I'm trying to find a situation in which I would use the phrase "Le réalité et toi, vous ne vous entendez pas, n'est-ce pas?". Perhaps the next time I meet Tony Blair (a rosbif who is as fluent in French as President Chirac is in English).

Thanks to our devoted Palm Springs blogger, Ron Gilbert, for this one. I'm still wiping the coffee off the monitor.

A new phrase...

...to me is "anthropodermic bibliopagy". Find out what it means here. You might be surprised.