Category Archives: French language

French language, Life in France, Lifestyle

New Year Resolutions for 2015

January 2, 2015 Rosemary Kneipp 10 Comments

Who remembers their new year resolutions ? I certainly don’t so rereading last year’s blog post was very helpful.

Homemade foie gras and vouvray to see the New Year in before the fire

The first resolution was to have a maximum number of holiday bookings for Closerie Falaiseau during the season. At one stage, it looked as though August would be completely empty but in the end, it filled up, giving us a total of 15 weeks which was very satisfactory. Now that we are living here permanently, we’re not sure about how we’ll manage rental, but we’re pretty certain we’ll be renting out the entire house for the month of September.

In front of the court room in Blois after taking oath

Second on the list was to diversify into some sort of tourist-related activity in Blois which did not even remotely happen due to lack of time and energy. My translation business unexpectedly picked up and I was appointed court translator in December which may also keep me busier than I expected.

A repeat of our Danube cycling holiday was my third resolution. We spent a month cycling in Germany along the Moselle and the Elbe in particular and found ourselves up in Friesland in the very north of the country chasing the sun and admiring the windmills.

My fourth resolution which was to discover the secret of getting enough sleep simply didn’t happen. I think the situation even got worse. I don’t think there is an answer without medication which I am still resisting.

The Landhaus at night in Bernkastel in Germany

Improving my night photography skills was already a carry-over resolution from the year before and no progress was made, especially as my night vision has gone down as a result of my otherwise successful cataract operation.

So what are my resolutions for 2015?

The last two months with Jean Michel in retirement mode have taken so much out of me that I am scaling down my resolutions this year.

When walking up the hill to Château de Chaumont after Christmas with Black Cat and the Flying Dutchman, I discovered that my iPhone counts my steps. How it does so, I do not know but it seems that we should be banking on an average of 10,000 steps a day. Just to give you an idea, it’s 3.30 pm and so far, by just staying in the house, I have clocked up 1000 steps. Yesterday, with two not very long walks, I made it to 10,000. So that is my first resolution – to average 10,000 steps a day over a week.

The second is to make a video for each Friday’s French post. Considering that I am only averaging one post a week at the moment and have missed several Fridays along the way, this might be a bit ambitious, but I’m hoping that our holiday in Grenada at the end of January is going to give us both a new lease of life.

I learnt recently that there are excellent Italian lessons in Blois so I am going to sign up in February (no point in doing so before going to Spain or I’m going to be speaking Spanitalian) as my third resolution. I’ve been wanting to improve my basic Italian for a long time so this is something I’m really happy about. My ultimate aim when I eventually retire is to live in Italy for a few months.

My fourth resolution is to find a way to help Jean Michel improve his English. A friend has told me about a group she goes to in the south of France where you partner up with the opposite in your language combination and speak each language for ¾ hour. He likes the idea and I have already found one English speaker who’s interested.

For my fifth resolution, I debated about putting night photography back on the agenda but now that we’re living in Blois, I have even less motivation than before. So I’ve decided on something quite different. I am going to stop complaining about things and look on the positive side of life. At the moment I’m looking forward to the daffodils in spring!

So, with that, I would like to wish you an excellent 2015 andI’d love to know some of your resolutions!

French language

Friday’s French – poil, cheveux, hair, fur

December 12, 2014 Rosemary Kneipp 17 Comments

You may remember a discussion about poêle a couple of weeks ago. Now there is another word that is pronounced exactly the same way (unless you come from the south of France and pronounce the “e” at the end of poêle) and seems to have resulted in a few embarrassing situations for some of our readers!

Poil, from the Latin pilus, means body hair and applies to both animals and humans. In the case of animals, of course, it’s what we call fur. Un chien à poil ras = A dog with short fur. It is also used for a man’s beard, what we sometimes refer to as bristles in English.

It is NOT used for the hair on your head which is cheveu in the singular and cheveux in the plural. J’ai trouvé un cheveu gris sur ma tête – I found a grey hair on my head ; il a des cheveux bouclés = he has curly hair.

But back to poil which is far more interesting because of all the many expressions that exist.

Etre à poil means to be stark naked, as in, you can see all the person’s hair.

Avoir un poil dans la main (literally, to have a hair in one’s hand) = to be lazy. Now why is a complete mystery.

Reprendre du poil de la bête = to pick up again, to regain strength. For example, j’ai eu la grippe pendant une semaine, mais j’ai repris du poil de la bête : I was down with the flu for a week, but now I’m on top of things again.

The expression literally means to take fur from an animal because people believed that the fur of an animal that had just bitten you could be used to heal the wound. It seems there is an English expression “the hair of the dog” that means an alcholic beverage consumed to cure a hangover, but I have personally never heard of it !

Another expression is s’il avait un poil de bon sens : if he had an ounce of good sense.

C’est pile poil ce que je voulais: it’s exactly what I wanted. This comes from tomber pile (au) poil from the expression pile ou face which means heads or tails (or more exactly tails or heads) and au poil which means exactly, that is, to within a hair’s breadth.

Do you know any other expressions with poil?

French language, Uncategorized

Friday’s French – poêle, poeliste, fumiste, fumisterie

November 28, 2014 Rosemary Kneipp 9 Comments

I would just like to point out straight away that poeliste is not a real word but it amused my Solognot neighbour Alain no end. We are thinking of putting a wood-burning stove in our downstairs living room (as I mentioned earlier this week) and the stove installer recommended by Alain came round to give us a quote.

One of several porcelain stoves in Meissen in Germany - un poêle. — One of several porcelain stoves in Meissen in Germany – un poêle.

The French for wood-burning stove is poêle from the Latin pensilis, meaning suspended, from the verb pendere, to be suspended, which gave pendent and pendulous in English. Pensilis may seem far removed from poêle, but remember that an ê in French often indicates that an “s” dropped out. In this case, the “n” got lost as well.

Initially it designated baths suspended from vaults and heated underneath in all those rich Roman villas. After that it meant a heated chamber and eventually the cast iron or earthenware stove we know today.

When poêle means a stove, it’s masculine. But listen to this. When it means a frying pan, it’s feminine. Same spelling, same pronunciation and everything. But it doesn’t come from pensilis. It comes from patella meaning a small dish. Patella first became paielle then paele and maybe poesle (1579) which would explain today’s poêle. A small frying pan is a poêlon, which of course is masculine. How we’re supposed to remember that I don’t know.

I based my use of poêliste on fumiste (from fumée, smoke) which means heating mechanic and also chimney sweep, although the more usual word is ramoneur.

But fumiste has another meaning – a shirker. I asked Alain why but he didn’t know. Good old Wikipedia came to the rescue. Apparently it comes from a vaudeville show called La Famille du fumiste about a heating mechanic who wasn’t the sort of person you could really count on!

The noun fumisterie whose real meaning is a heating mechanic’s workshop now has the same derogatory meaning as fumiste. C’est de la fumisterie means it’s a fraud. So I’m hoping our poêliste is not a fumiste or I am going to be cold all winter …

Cooking, Food, French language

Friday’s French – marmelade, confiture & jam

November 14, 2014 Rosemary Kneipp 8 Comments

I was recently told a very plausible and fascinating story about the origin of the word marmelade.

France's most popular jams: abricots et fraises — France’s most popular jams: abricots et fraises

The future Mary Queen of Scots was brought up in France, mostly in the Castle of Amboise just down the road from us. She was often sick because she had no appetite until someone finally came up with a special treat – a jelly called marmelade because it was made for Marie Malade (sick Mary).

Sad to say, the story is not true. Marmelada comes from the Portuguese marmelo meaning quince and is a sort of quince paste introduced into England in about 1480, and predates Mary Queen of Scots who was born in 1542. She may well have liked it but is not responsible for the name! Note the different spelling in French and English – the second “a” becomes an “e” in French.

I’m always amazed to hear how such stories can be perpetrated without any foundation other than a fertile imagination. Not that I have anything against fertile imaginations …

You don’t often see marmalade in France so for my Christmas Cake I use confiture d’écorce d’orange (écorce = peel) which seems to work just as well.

For some reason that I have never fathomed, the most popular jams in France are strawberry and apricot, neither of which I like. Even at Angelina’s, they are the only choice available!

The word confiture comes from the verb confire in French and the Latin conficere meaning to completely finish (past participle confectus which you will recognise in confectionery). Confiture, introduced into French in the late 18th century, initially meant fruit cooked in sugar (candied fruit, stewed fruit, etc.) before being limited to jam in the 19th century.

The English jam, on the other hand, derives from the verb “to jam” meaning to crowd, squeeze or block because the jam we eat is the result of a congestion or the resulting stoppage.

You may remember from reading Victorian novels that everyone used to make “preserves”. The French equivalent is conserves. And, just to avoid any future blunders, a préservatif is a French letter or condom as it’s called today. There is a little town in France called Condom, by the way.

I have only been able to find one expression containing the word confiture in French: Donner de la confiture aux cochons whose English equivalent, which I have never heard before (oh where is my general knowledge?) is “Throw pearls before swine” which refers to a quotation from Matthew 7:6 in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount: “Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.” Should we read any significance into the fact that this has been translated as confiture in French? The country of gastronomie?

In English we have traffic jams which are embouteillages in French from bouteille meaning bottle, the equivalent of our bottlenecks.

I’m sure you know lots of other expressions using “jam”. Do you know their equivalents in French as well?

French customs, French language

Friday’s French – L’été indien, l’été de la saint martin, l’été de Vireux

November 7, 2014 Rosemary Kneipp 8 Comments

The exceptional warmth in France (and most of the northern hemisphere from what I can gather) this year has everyone talking – incorrectly as usual – about the été indien which is a literal translation of Indian summer.

A typical day in autumn this year, though technically not an Indian summer because we haven't had any frost yet and it's not November 8 yet! — A typical day in autumn this year, though technically not an Indian summer because we haven’t had any frost yet and it’s not November 8 yet!

The real meaning of l’été indien is a period of unseasonably warm, dry weather after the first frosts in autumn and just before winter. It occurs either in October or the beginning of November and can last from a few days to more than a week or not happen at all.

Most French people use été indien to mean the warm sunny days that we often get in September and then use été de la Saint-Martin or été de Vireux for what is known as an Indian summer, defined by the US National Weather Service as conditions that are sunny and clear with above normal temperatures, occurring late-September to mid-November. It is usually described as occurring after a killing frost.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac has additional criteria:

“As well as being warm, the atmosphere during Indian summer is hazy or smoky, there is no wind, the barometer is standing high, and the nights are clear and chilly. A moving, cool, shallow polar air mass is converting into a deep, warm, stagnant anticyclone (high pressure) system, which has the effect of causing the haze and large swing in temperature between day and night. The time of occurrence is important: The warm days must follow a spell of cold weather or a good hard frost. The conditions described above must occur between St. Martin’s Day (November 11) and November 20. For over 200 years, The Old Farmer’s Almanac has adhered to the saying, ‘If All Saints’ (November 1) brings out winter, St. Martin’s brings out Indian summer.’ ” Much more strict than our current use.

Saint Martin actually died in Candes on November 8 but the fête de l’été de la Saint-Martin is celebrated on November 11 – don’t ask me why.

Vireux is more problematic. My Robert Etymological Dictionary is still in a carton somewhere (and I can’t find the notebook linking up the carton numbers with their contents …). Vireux normally means noxious but it also comes from virer meaning change, seen in expressions such as virer de tout vent – to be as changeable as a weathercock.

It sound like a plausible explanation, doesn’t it? The idea of changing over to winter.

What do you call an Indian summer in your country?

French language, Loire Valley châteaux

Friday’s French – coussiège, cushion & siège

October 24, 2014 Rosemary Kneipp 4 Comments

In Closerie Falaiseau our late 16th century house in the Loire Valley, we have a little stone seat in the alcove formed by the 70 cm wall next to the window. In a 17th century house we used to rent at Christmas in Normandy, there was one each side of the window.

Last weekend we visited château de Fougères in the Loire Valley and I was delighted to learn there is actually a name for this little seat – un coussiège.

Usually made of stone, they were common in mediaeval constructions and formed part of the wall. They were covered with wood and cushions (coussins).

Now this got me thinking about where the word coussin comes from. I wondered whether it came from the word coudre which means “to sew” in French, because the ladies often sat next to the window with their embroidery watching the world go by because there was more light. A coussiège in that case would be a “sewing seat”.

But in fact, it comes from Vulgar Latin coxinus, which comes from coxa (thigh) and –inus, and means a stuffed object originally placed under the thighs. It might also come from the Latin culcita meaning mattress.

Cushion, which appeared in English in about 1300, comes from Old French coissin (12c., Modern French coussin), probably a variant of Vulgar Latin coxinum, from Latin coxa “hip, thigh”. Someone has counted more than 400 spellings of the plural of this word in Middle English wills and inventories. I can’t even begin to imagine that many spellings for the same term.

Also from the French word are Italian cuscino, Spanish cojin.

Coudre on the other hand, comes from Vulgar Latin cosere and Latin consuere, to sew (con means together). So much for the sewing seat theory!

So far, the only term I’ve found in English for coussiège is window seat which is most unimaginative and doesn’t conjure up mediaeval ladies sewing in the castle window. One day, a friend came buy with her little girl and showed her the coussiège. Some time later, my friend and I were having tea and wondered where she’d got to. You guessed it – she was downstairs on the coussiège being a mediaeval lady!

French language

Friday’s French – piles, batteries & torches

October 17, 2014 Rosemary Kneipp 4 Comments

We’ve just bought a set of telephones and are setting them up. “Est-ce qu’ils ont fourni les piles?” I ask. “Non“, says Jean Michel, “il y a des batteries.”

He is not correcting my French. Pile is the word I first learnt for the English battery back in the seventies and I was surprised when I started hearing people say batterie which has several totally different meanings. I assumed they were just using the English word.

But no, like many English borrowings, it has acquired a specific meaning. A batterie is not just any battery, but a rechargeable battery. It is also correct to say pile rechargeable but batterie is certainly more common in the technical world.

Another meaning of pile that I learnt early on is a square flashlight or torch as we call it in Australia, in any case. I had never seen them before I came to France. I don’t know if they are common in the other English-speaking countries. It’s real name of course is a lampe de poche, though it’s certainly far too big to put in my pocket!

A torche or, more correctly, une lampe torche is something else again. It’s a long flashlight, what for me is a normal torch.

Torche also means a torch in the sense of an Olympic torch and what we call a flare on an oil rig.

Just to make matters more complicated you can have a batterie de piles, which is a serie of batteries, because batterie means a series of apparatus of the same type designed to be used or operated together, such as accumulators, condensers and electric ovens.

Une batterie de cuisine, for example, is a set of saucepans and frying pans.

A drum set is also called a batterie. You’d never say mon frère joue des tambours but mon frère joue de la batterie even though a tambour is an individual drum.

To go back to pile, it also means a pile in the English sense of a pile of dirty washing (une pile de linge sale).

A pile is also a bridge pier and sometimes a bridge pile, but the nuances are too complicated to go into here because some bridges have both piers and piles and others just have piles!

In the electrical sense, it can be a cell as well e.g. une pile solaire = solar cell, une pile bâton = pencil battery, une pile bouton = watch battery (I love that one – bouton literally means button) and une pile atomique = nuclear reactor or atomic pile.

If you want to say that an appliance is battery-operated, you say à piles or fonctionnant sur piles e.g. un jouet à piles (a battery-operated toy).

Et maintenant je vais recharger mes batteries!

French language, Wine

Friday’s French – bernache

October 10, 2014 Rosemary Kneipp 5 Comments

Today I learnt a new word – bernache – used in Touraine and particularly in Anjou, to designate what is known in other parts of France as vin nouveau, i.e. grape juice at the beginning of its fermentation.

I’ve already recounted our experience with vin nouveau in Alsace and the famous beaujolais nouveau tradition that is sadly dying out in France, but I had never heard of bernache.

Like any vin nouveau, bernache is only available for a short period at the end of the grape harvest (vendange), that is, from about the end of October to mid-November and is usually served with roasted chestnuts (marrons grillés).

It is mainly produced in Montlouis and Vouvray. Cloudy, a little sweet and sometimes very bubbly, it can’t be transported very far. It’s a transitional stage of traditional vinification.

In the Saumur area, further along the Loire, where Jean Michel grew up, it’s called beurnoche.

Bernache has another meaning – a barnacle goose (from the benus Branta . Not that I have ever seen a barnacle goose! Unfortunately, my Robert etymological dictionary is currently in a carton in Paris waiting to be moved to Blois or I might have been able to find out if the two words are connected.

In any case, I am going to try and find a vineyard where I can try some bernache vin nouveau!

French language, Uncategorized

Friday’s French – déménager, déménagement, ménager

October 3, 2014 Rosemary Kneipp 8 Comments

Lundi on déménage ! For some reason, it sounds more specific in French than the English “We’re moving on Monday !” I guess it’s because “move” can be used to mean so many different things but déménager always means moving house (or office or whatever).

A ménage, which comes old French mesnage, a derivative of the Latin mansio (house), is a married couple or a household, so déménager literally means “breaking up the household”. And that is exactly what is happening at the moment as I sort out and pack up our goods and chattels accumulated over the last 9 years (and more).

We’re having déménageurs do the actual moving with a camion de déménagement. Déménageur refers to both the removalist company and the individual person doing the moving. I had 5 devis (quotes) done. The estimated volume ranged from 52 cubic meters to 67 cubic meters, which is astonishing. And the prices ranged from 2,500 euro to 4,700 euro to move our belongings to Blois, 200 kilometers away.

I was so suspicious of the lowest quote that I rang them to find out why. They had made a mistake and quoted for Paris! They increased the quote to 3,000 euro which was still belong the next price of 3,600 euro so we chose Ultimate Déménagement. We’ll see how competent they are!

Taking the piano down 4 flights of stairs — Les déménageurs descendent le piano quatre étages

Déménageur has given the expression il a une carrure de déménageur – he’s built like a tank. But the champion of all was the single porteur who originally carried our piano up four flights of stairs on his back. It took two déménageurs to take it down again. They had heard of a porteur but never seen one in action.

Another expression that I like is déménager à la cloche de bois: to sneak off in the middle of the night. Though why there is a wooden bell involved, I don’t know!

Also, ça déménage is slang for “it’s brill/awesome”.

The verb ménager, however, means something totally different. The idea is to make sure a person is not offended.

Il faut vraiment la ménager, elle est très sensible – You have to treat her gently – she’s very sensitive.

Il faut qu’on ménage les deux parties – We have to keep both parties happy.

Si vous ne la ménagez pas, elle va beaucoup souffrir – If you don’t treat her tactfully, she will be very hurt.

Another great expression is ménager la chèvre et le chou (the goat and the cabbage) = to sit on the fence.

When applied to an object, ménager means to treat something with care or sparingly. The most widespread use is ménager ses forces or efforts = to save or conserve one’s strength.

So we can put déménager, déménagement and ménager together in the same sentence:

Un bon déménageur sait ménager ses forces pour mener à bien le déménagement. = A good mover knows how to save his strength so the move will go well.

Now I have to get back to my cartons de déménagement …

French language, History, Uncategorized

Friday’s French – taxi, fiacre, taxis de la Marne

September 26, 2014 Rosemary Kneipp 6 Comments

I’m very excited because yesterday, I discovered the origin of the word taxi! And it’s Parisian. Who would have imagined that?

I learnt about it while taking some Australian friends on a walking tour that included the oldest houses in Paris.

Paris has lots of street signs explaining its history and we came across one that talked about the invention of the fiacre.

In 1612, a coach company from Amiens rented a house in rue Saint Antoine in Paris, bearing an effigy of Saint Fiacre, the famous barefoot friar (carme déchaussé, if you’re interested) who predicted that Anne of Austria would have a son (one chance out of two, as my friends pointed out). He’s also the patron saint of gardens.

In any event, Saint Fiacre eventually became a sort of Saint Christopher and his image was displayed on coaches all over Paris to prevent accidents. Ever since, coaches have always been called fiacres. Just before the French revolution in 1789, there were about 800 of them parked on 33 stations including more than 650 under shelters called remises.

The coach drivers had a terrible reputation and the police did everything they could to control them. Each driver had a number that cost a fortune to buy and a booklet containing their licence to park and drive the coach. After reaching their zenith at the turn of the 20th century, horse-drawn carriages declined and were replaced with the automobile.

The name of taxauto was soon adopted, followed by taxi, which is an abbreviation of taximètre and designated not the taximeter, but the vehicle containing it. The term taxi took over completely after a famous historical event in the first world war known as the “Taxis de la Marne“.

On 7th September 1914, in order to reinforce the Maunoury army, General Galliéni requisitioned 700 Parisian taxis to ferry the 7th division troups from Sevran, Livry and Gagny in the east of Paris (i.e. the Marne) to Nanteuil-le-Haudouin and Plessis-Belleville in Picardy, which represented a distance of about 40 kilmeters . The meeting point was boulevard des Invalides.

During the night, with four men to a taxi, most of the division was transferred, totalling more than 5,000 combatants, a somewhat modest number compared with the Maunoury army’s total of 140,000, but the story has gone down in history. You can find more details here.

And would you believe, when I was taking my photo of a Parisian taxi, I accidentally took one of a Taxi de la Marne, even though I had never heard of it before! But since it’s a modern cab, I checked it out and learnt that during the recent centenary – 7th September 2014 – a reconstitution took place with 10 originals taxis and 120 modern ones bearing the insignia shown on the photo as well as a number of military vehicles as you can see from the video below on the France 3 regional television website.

I wish I’d known at the time!

Aussie in France