The character migrated to the marionnette and puppet theater, and into the English language as Punch (as in a “Punch and Judy show”). Polichinelle is the French name of a character from the Italian commedia dell’arte theater tradition.Polichinelle marionnette from late 1800s. Also what one might experience after gulping strong spirits. un haut-le-coeur is a shudder, typically of nausea or disgust.La rafale is also the name of a French fighter jet, while une rafle means a police round-up notably of Jews in World War II (the subject of a 2010 film) and of Algerians during their 1958-62 war for independence. Curiously, neither of these seems to be most frequent meaning present in search results for these words. I learned that word during a winery tour in France. Not to be confused with la rafle, which is the stem to which grapes attach. une rafale is a gust of wind, strong and sudden.It appears mostly white, with some darker spots of bran. Moreover, the processes of milling wheat into flour includes an intermediate product before final filtering where you have mostly flour, but with some specks of bran still mixed in. Turns out this is a readily available product. It turns out that son has multiple meanings: a third-person singular possessive pronoun a sound that you hear and … part of the outer envelope of a wheat kernel, what we call “bran” in english. It took me a good 15 minutes of sleuthing to figure out why this expression aligned with its meaning. They are also called taches de rousseur or simply rousseurs. I found multiple interesting treatments of the word un machin while researching, including this French Word of the Day post and this Français Authentique video: Simenon uses it in a police officer’s description of a run down hotel: «L’auberge est rien de luxueux… un machin pour les rouliers» (“the hotel is nothing fancy… a hole in the wall for truckers.” Note that the word machin should not be confused with une machine, which is more or less exactly the English “machine”: a reputable mechanical object used for sewing, cleaning, manufacture, construction, etc. It is also used to refer to a person in a pejorative and dismissive fashion, like “what’s his name” or “somebody or other.” You don’t know the person’s name, but it’s really of no interest or importance. You use it when you don’t know or have forgotten the name for something, or when you refer to a large collection of disparate things. The word means a non-specific object, akin to the English “thingy”, “thing-a-ma-bob”, or “what-cha-ma-call-it”. It is a close synonym of the words truc and bidule. I somehow hadn’t registered encountering it before now. un machin is a funny, slang word, quite common in modern speech and print.Here’s the list of all 50 unfamiliar words, sorted by modern word frequency. See Vocab list: La Tête d’un Homme, Part 1 for the words from chapters 1-5, as well as my musings on the novel itself. In this list, I’ve included any word I didn’t think I would recognize and know the meaning of if I saw it in complete isolation. In past vocabulary list posts I included only words and expressions I couldn’t recall even in context. This is the second (and last) batch of unfamiliar vocabulary words I culled from George Simenon’s 1931 novel La Tête d’un Homme.
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She runs a library-based French conversation group in Pittsburgh. Speaking of Montpellier, one of the other guests at the inn where we was staying was a French woman who had lived all her life in Montpellier before coming to the US some 10 years ago. I’d say 60 or 70 felt automatic, another 10-20 required deliberate application of a rule I knew, and the rest were either unknown to me or involved a forgotten entry in a rarely used part of the conjugation table of an irregular verb. Most of the questions were about grammar, 10 or 15 were about oral comprehension, and a handful were about vocabulary. The instructions exhorted me not to guess, for my own benefit, as it’s a diagnostic instrument. The test had 100 questions, multiple choice, with an “I don’t know” option for each one.
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Traveling to France in summer 2021 was too daunting for post-pandemic me. The school is in Montpellier, but I will be in my living room doing the course by video conference. Yesterday I took the placement exam for my 2-week course in August with ILA ( Institut Linguistique Adenet) in Montpellier. Decent mindless content while walking, good for reinforcement. They are slow and simple, but not too simple.
RESTAURANT LE BIDULE MARSEILLE PLUS
This morning I listened to a couple of episodes of the Français Authentique podcast: Faire chou blanc and Je ne progresse plus en français.
![restaurant le bidule marseille restaurant le bidule marseille](https://static.restovisio.com/gallery/dyn/large/w645/55880e19d8fc3-5cf737ad805d50c6c17eb09a383bf746.jpg)
RESTAURANT LE BIDULE MARSEILLE UPDATE
I went on vacation last week, so this is an update on various French activities here and there.