Les mots, les paroles.

The first question I was ever asked as a teacher was,
'What's the French for 'cumberbund'?' Should have terminally undermined my confidence, it DID undermine my confidence but I carried on regardless. I still don't know the French for cumberbund, however I have asked a great many French ppl this question.
'So how do you spell that?'
'Ah...it has a silent b, like in limb, dumb, or plumber,'
'Interesting, silent letters...'
'Yes, like gnarled, gnash, knight, knee, wry, wring,'
'How strange, a language with silent letters..'
'Hey! French has loads of....ah, I see:)'

We have been watching our DVDs of Little Britain over the first few days of Christmas, I think we have some more people hooked, at least Kevin's brother found a copy of series 1 and bought it to take back to Toronto. A character that goes over really well is Daffydd Thomas. In the complex way in which people think, that took me back to Renaissance French. We had the most charismatic lecturer for Renaissance French, who made it all come to life. She also made us do so much else without realising. When discussing Rabelais's 'Gargantua' she had us all scurry off to buy or borrow Teach yourself Greek, Plato's 'Symposium', 'The Last Days of Socrates', 'The Republic'. I can remember her hypnotising us while demystifying du Bellay's 'Divers Jeux Rustiques', her stance putting her in total control of the room, her hand painting in the air 'la disposition des mots sur la page,'.
There was a lot of reading around for mediaeval French too. We had to have a special dictionary for that, whilst it was possible to read middle French more or less straight off, mediaeval was harder, just squinting and reading fast wasn't enough. Many of the texts were Celtic/Breton stories that had gone back and forth across the Channel. We had to read the Mabinoggion and this came with an Appendix on how to pronounce Welsh. Hence Daffydd = Daffith.
All of those extra things we went off and pursued, all of those little paths that led nowhere in particular, they were the enrichment, whilst teaching us about erudition in the texts, those lecturers were providing us with intellectual truffles, ambrosia.

The book about the twins that I am reading, one of whom is schizophrenic, has become compulsive now as I am deep into the descriptions of her episodes. It is fascinating in the svengali or cobra sense of the word.

I also keep thinking about 'Brokeback Mountain', I don't think I've ever been so impacted by a love story, such intensity, so passionate and so un-cheesy, it must be difficult to make films about love without the interference of the fromage.