Idiomatic Entanglements

It started with me saying, “I’m done.”  Then another person in the meeting said, “In French there is an expression: ‘Je suis fait comme un rat.’”  Being a speaker of French, but not, as is said, a native one, I heard the phrase echo in my head in these words, “Je suis cuite comme un rat.” Then, of course I had to look up the expression, first online, and then in one of my favorite reference books (Dictionnaire des expressions et locutions) and then in one of the source books it cited, which I happened to have hanging around since.
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Leavves

Does It Make a Difference?

Leaves falling in the rain It’s raining so hard that leaves fall from the trees. The temperature is in the mid-range that comes in early autumn and early spring. Is it autumn or spring?  Seeing the leaves fall reminds me of the sometimes murky rules of style.  For example, in English, there is never a space between a word and a punctuation mark. In French, that’s not the case. Depending on the punctuation mark and its location in a sentence, a space may be required before the mark. Working in English and French, I sometimes forget I’ve set the default language.
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