The history lecturer used one of my jokes!

When we did our May '68 extravaganza I had to talk about the massive population growth post WW2, and I said "ça s'appelle en français le baby-boom*", which is perfectly true, but it got a laugh at the time.

Well in history yesterday he was talking about the massive population growth post WW2 and he said "en français on dit baby-boom", and everyone laughed again, but I thought "someone remembered a joke I made ... in French!"

* you have to say "bébi-boum", that is with two french-style syllables in baby and a very round projected oo, but it is spelt baby-boom.

Comments

Andrew and Cora said…
France has resisted the incursion of English words and phrases much better than some other countries. In Brazilian Portuguese we are constantly needing to use words like "insight", "cheeseburger", "background" "feedback" "shopping centre" "home theatre" and "outdoors".

The difficult part is that these words sometimes have meanings rather different from in English. A great example is "outdoors," which means "advertisement hoarding" or (for North Americans) "billboard".

The other thing is pronunciation: these are the words we find HARDEST to say. We KNOW how to say them, but if we say them the way we know, no one understands. So you say "insyche" and "sheezebooerger" and "feedgeback" and feel stupid. But you get in the swim eventually. Though you have to be pretty tuned in to know which band, book or film are being referred to by: Hedgy Hodgy Shilly Pepairs, Airhee Pottair and Hachlee Anjie Un.

And you have to be careful not to laugh when you discover that the common pronunciation of "baby sitter" is "baby sister."

Or cry when someone spells your name Whendreul. (He knew there was a W somewhere...)

Love to all our French colleagues
2:43 pm
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