Days here start out pretty much the same. Breakfast, then on to the Métro. One of the nice things about the Métro is that free newspapers abound. Many mornings someone hands me one as I walk into the station, and if not, you can typically pick one up somewhere. Personally, I can’t get past the first sentence of the newspaper without running into words that I don’t know. Here are some examples from the past couple of days, from the newspaper and life in general:
- la chaleur: heat. Everyone talks about how the summer heat is just around the corner. No sign of it yet.
- la myrtille: blueberry. The crêperie that I went to yesterday had myrtille crêpes. “Myrtle crepes?,” I thought…”Sounds horrible!” Nope–a false cognate.
- le pot: a variety of meanings. I ran across two in three days. One is of a pot, tub, or jar–I ran into this sense when reading the jar of chestnut spread that I put on my morning tartine when I don’t feel like Nutella. The other sense is of a party with drinks–I ran into this sense when there was a pot at the end of the day of PhD student presentations of their research progress last Friday.
- le ciron: the best word of the weekend–cheese mite! My latest cheese is Mimolette–specifically Mimolette jeune, a mimolette that has been aged less than six months. Take a look at the picture here–the holes on the crust are from cirons. If you are as curious about what a cheese mite is as I was, see here. Mimolette jeune is good, incidentally, and a good cheese for Americans–the flavor is pretty similar to a cheddar.
Zipf's Law 