j'accuse!
This post of Kriston's reminded me of something that terrifies me — something that embodies a nightmarish vision of a future that I would prefer to avoid. One in which all banter between myself and my middleaged friends occurs in French. It makes me want to start pricing motorcycles. Fast ones, with poor cornering ability.
I didn't take French in high school. I took Latin. In college my Echols status got me out of the language requirement. I've picked up some Italian since then — enough that, with sufficient funds, I can survive on my own in that harsh wasteland for literally days at a time. But any discussion of my "language skills" is far more likely to revolve around compilation than conjugation.
So maybe it's just that I'm ignorant (clearly I am). Maybe it's lingering childhood resentment for my parents' secret dinnertable code. Maybe it's the imprecise instrument I'm using. But whenever I drag myself from Salon or The New Yorker or some lefty comment thread to translate some alleged bon mots on Babelfish, the results are just awful. Like, sitcom awful. Garfield awful, even. What's the French word for "banal", anyway?
Comments
Mitsurugi said it best: "Pretentious fools!"
You've got it all wrong—the lingua postapocalyptique is German. You can fake French, but German introduces the terrifying prospect of having to know two words to understand any given new single concept. They make it up as they go along!
Well, you're right -- if it's a romance language I can generally figure it out. But I like the idea of just inventing new words when you need them.
I took French under extreme duress- my mother believed having a daughter who knew French would help her excel at the WaPo crossword. She was wrong. I learned and promptly forgot even the most basic of four years of French, and I would give a limb to know Spanish. Oh, she'll get hers. (that last part is to be read menacingly, obvs.)
yeah. much more important to the post crossword is knowing what "oleo" is.
Oh, come on. Nothing's more awful than Garfield.
Only the Germans could create the word Schadenfreude, which takes at least five words to describe in any other language. And who needs one word for "pleasure derived from others' misfortune" anyway?
Most people.
Not to mention, "shameful joy" is only five words for extremely small values of five.
And it utterly fails to mean what "Schadenfreude" means, too!
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