![]() Or as the French say, elle a une araignée au plafond. And from my Tupelo-born friend Philip: If she were any dumber we’d have to water her. And there are all the great variations on a theme for not-so-bright folks: He’s not the brightest bulb on the tree, sharpest knife in the drawer, a few fries short of a Happy Meal, dumber than a bag of hammers. A CEO might be a big wheel, but in France he’s une grosse legume (a fat vegetable, which seems very fitting in many cases). ![]() Same in French, by the way: oreilles en feuille de chou. Metaphors and similes tickle me to death. I love how we take a word that means one thing and make it stand for something else. Miam Miam is French for yum-yum although to my ear it sounds like a cat who’s digging his Fancy Feast. Badaboum! means crash! Patati patata is their version of yada yada yada. ![]() The French, I have learned via Babbel, have their own versions of sound-effect words. There is a ten-dollar word for this I learned in high school - onomatopoeia. (The weather would have gone to the dogs). If I were in Toulouse, Il fait un temps de chien. If I were in Tupelo, where my friend Philip was born, it would be raining harder than a cow pissing on a flat rock. Like I said, it’s raining here in Tallahassee today. They give special spice to the places where we live. Unless you’re British, then it’s just slang for bloke. So a word that was used in the Middle Ages to refer to an actor now means a crabby old dude. It comes from the obsolete word guiser, meaning someone who walks around in disguise, a performer in a masquerade. I love finding out where words come from. This morning, reading a newspaper opinion piece on the grid crisis going on in Texas, I found out what a kakistocracy is. Both things made me realize how much I love words. And I just finished my French Babbel lesson, which happened to focus on weather.
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