I’m so thrilled that some people want to participate!  Since January is the freebie month [there is still a prize though!], I’ll be generous and if anyone made more than one guess in their comment, and one of the guesses was the correct one, I’ll give it to you.  I’m never this generous:  blame it on the cheesecake and chocolate mousse I had at work today [the good news:  it was my only sweet treat today.  The bad news:  until I got home].

The fact that I’m an oddity will come as no surprise to anyone, although only a few know about my love of the French language.  So great is my love of the language that I speak it at home for fun and although I pretend that I hate having to deal with our occasional francophone customer at the clothing store, I actually relish the chance to increase my vocabulary as they invariably teach me a new word.  In honour of that language, I thought I’d share that one of my most favourite sounds in that language is the ‘u’ sound.  It sounds so rich, so cultured.  I remember that one of my dad’s old “learn to speak French” books [that I read for fun] describes how to make this sound:  you must pronounce the long o sound [as in 'boots'] continuously, and simply keep ooooing, and then purse your lips.  Instantly, your ooo switches to the French ‘u’, heard in such words as aperçu, and although the change may seem slight, the French ‘u’ is really a far richer sound than its anglophone counterpart.

Another way I test or keep up my French knowledge is by trying to translate song lyrics I know into French while maintaining the melody of the song.  [This may be one of those instances of boredom that a boyfriend would save me from]. 

You’d think that with all of this I’d pipe up in French at work at every opportunity, and dazzle my bosses with my skills.  Afterall, I’m going to be getting French training soon so a little practice would not hurt.  I don’t though:  I’m afraid that far from being dazzled they’ll be counting grammatical missteps and cringing inwardly.  [It's different at the store because far from caring how bad my grammar is, the customer just want to communicate to me that she wants tapered leg pants and not the wide leg pants that I'm showing her].  So, instead, I respond to my bosses’ flawless French in my all over the place, typical English, and no doubt leave them just as confused as if I were speaking my garbled brand of French.

Filed under: Introspective, Job, Mundane, WurdyGurdy by jummy