C'est une mauvaise chose à dire, mais ...

C'est un vrai cancre ; le professeur le met toujours au fond de la classe //

He's a real dunce; the teacher always puts him in the back of the classroom

Since today's Inktoner prompt ("roasted") doesn't really speak to me, I decided to take one from Transparent Language French Word of the Day again.

What a mean thing to say though. He is not slow or stupid, he is just dreamy. Look at him there, everybody is already gone and he is just sitting there looking at the last leaves of autumn.

Which reminds me of a lovely Spanish idiom "estar pensando en las musarañas" - to be distracted, dreamy, absent, but literally "to be thinking about the shrews". Why the shrews? Well, they are cute.

meterse en berenjenales

Today, I'd like to take a breather from French and talk about a funny expression our teacher used. It was in my french class, so it fits here, sort of.

We have only been doing french for a month, so we can't handle any complex concepts. I did have a go at one though; when my teacher finally understood what I was trying to say he said "Te metes en berenjenales". The meaning was immediately apparent from the context - "you are getting yourself into trouble", but I thought the expression he used was funny. Literally it means "you are getting into eggplant patches".  

Explanation, as I later found, is as follows - eggplants' stems have spines, so if you somehow get yourself into an eggplant patch it will be difficult to get out. 

First I couldn't believe that there is such a specialized word as "berenjenal" (eggplant patch), so it made me imagine a sort of jungle of eggplants. Alas, the word does exist, but I still prefer to think of it as an eggplant jungle.


And here you have it. Sumo wrestler cat has gotten himself into an eggplant forest; he doesn't like it at all, I am afraid.