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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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Life without Cardinals?

« I can’t imagine life without cardinals, » I wrote to a friend in California, because when I sent her this picture she texted that her state did not know them.  I next sent the photo to an aunt in France, and she replied likewise.  This made me check online, where I learned that this beautiful red bird mainly flies in the eastern half of the U.S. and southeastern Canada, and as far south only as Guatemala. Some individuals have been introduced in Bermuda and Hawai’i, but the red cardinal otherwise only calls my part of the world home. I took it as given.
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