Un flocon

Tu as un flocon sur le bout du nez ! // You have a snowflake on your nose!

Today’s picture is straight from my “French word of the day” email. ’Tis the season to be jolly, etc. You know. “Jolly, with mistletoe and holly and other things ending in ’olly” (Terry Pratchett, Hogfather).

We are are nearly done with our pre-Christmas exams, and Thursday is the last day of classes before the break. We have already got about a hectare-of-amazonian-forest worth of papers each to study over Christmas, which I fully intend to do, of course.

The cat, as it happens, doesn’t have a visible nose. So this is probably your only chance to find out where his nose is supposed to be.

Pictures of snowflakes @ Shutterstock.

S’il vous plaît

silver plate / s’il vous plaît / please

I always assumed that the use of “silver plate” in Nanny Ogg’s “fake foreign” was Terry Pratchett’s invention. I was quite surprised to find it listed as one of “American fighting words and phrases”. In the same capacity of course — as a way to remember how to say “please”, “s’il vous plaît”, in French. Maybe it is more widely used than I thought.

While we are on the subject, did you know that “Yellow blue vase” sounds like a very polite and formal (and not very well pronounced) “I love you” in Russian? If you didn’t, let it be your daily bit of useless knowledge.

Continuing with free associations: in a Russian folk tale there is an episode where a silver plate (saucer, to be more precise) and an apple were used for divination. This explains the weird writing on the sketch.

I am not sure whether all the above will help me to remember the spelling of s’il vous plaît, but silver plate is now etched in my memory.