Friday, October 14, 2005

Linguistic pitfall


Conversation on the way to school this morning

Me: You can tell it's autumn because of all the leaves on the ground.

Z: A qui je dois le dire? A la maîtresse? [Who should I say it to? My teacher?]

Me : What do you mean? You don't have to say it to anyone.

Z: Mais tu as dit... [Yes, but you said...]

Penny drops.

Me: It's just an expression. "You can tell" means "you can see"....

Category:

5 comments:

benoit said...

hello, I'm quite surprised to find a blog titled "peregrinations" -such a rare word !! And besides,a very nice one !! A close friend of mine, an artist, made an artistic hoax, based on a strange 18th-century dairy called...peregrinations. Maybe you could be interested :

http://loudolle.free.fr/

L'Oiseau said...

sweet!

Anonymous said...

I suppose at least twenty years ago my daughter came home with a drawing from la maternelle covered with bees, all different colours. The maîtresse had written in the margin quite seriously 'Où sont les billes'?
For a French pitfall: the other daughter produced a wonderful picture of a hill with a loaf of bread on top ... la maîtresse had said 'dessinez un pin en haut de la colline', maybe it was to illustrate a poem.
There used to be magazines in the sixties where mothers and grandmothers wrote in with letters recounting 'amusing' things (or sweet as l'oiseau would say) said by their children. Woman's Own was one.
Which reminds me it also had a problem page at the back by Evelyn Home where prudish adolescents like me tried to glean the facts of life from the problems posed by slightly less prudish adolescents. It was all very confusing.

ruth said...

hey thanks for stopping by mine, lesley. am blogrolling you...I'm SO jealous of your bookshelves. Mine have been n storage for 4 years and I miss my moments of sitting remembering, dipping, rereading, plucking and alphabetical rocks!

good timing your visit cos I'm playing in Bordeaux in a few days... le pin galant in merignac. mozart syphonies with the musiciens du louvre and Minkowski 20.30. do say hello if you decide to comea

Lesley said...

Benoit: I had a look at your friend's artwork and loved the skinny wooden man à la Giacometti.

Deborah: I learned a lot from the back pages of Woman's Own too! And Desmond Morris's "The Naked Ape!

MHIF: Shoot, the date in Merignac is no good for me: mucho complicated babysitting involved. You must come back.

Confinement

Being confined indoors most of the day, just the four of us, is reminding me of the days when my children were wee and most of our weekends ...