English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.
We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?
Have you noticed that we talk about certain things only when they are absent? Have you ever seen a horsefull carriage or a strapfull gown? Met a sung hero or experienced requited love? Have you ever run into someone who was combobulated, gruntled, ruly or peccable? And where are all those people who ARE spring chickens or who would actually hurt a fly?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm goes off by going on.
|
A poet can read. A poet can write. A poet is African in Africa, or Irish in Ireland, or French on the left bank of Paris, or white in Wisconsi...
|
Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.
|
Two Polish men at Halloween with burned faces. What happened? They were bobbing for french fries.
|
Dr. Evil The details of my life are quite inconsequential... very well, where do I begin My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds- pretty standard really. At the age of twelve I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum... it's breathtaking- I highly suggest you try it.
|
What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange misture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a french woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American.
|
To prove our determination and show to both the PSG directors and the French football authorities we disagree with their decisions (...), we have decided to not to send our professional squad to the match.
|
I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chloroflourocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom. I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground. Don't think of it as extinction. Think of it as downsizing.
|
Ambassador Puser the ambassador Reminds himself in French, felicitous tongue,...
|
'Escargot' is French for 'fat crawling bag of phlegm'.
|
Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, innuendo, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit, but unlike the French and the English, we have not been much good at wit since the days of Benjamin Franklin.
|
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
|
Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local caf? to the speech at a formal dinner.
|
The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity.
|
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
|
Although the French were very friendly and helpful. On one location we were to film at the top of the Eiffel Tower but we couldn't, as it was so misty with four inches of snow on the ground. We couldn't see a thing but we finally got it done.
|
The French will have to make their own determination.
|
I went to a restaurant that serves 'breakfast at any time'. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.
|
The consequences of things are not always proportionate to the apparent magnitude of those events that have produced them. Thus the American Revolution, from which little was expected, produced much; but the French Revolution, from which much was expected, produced little.
|
An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Sweedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
|
I would like to express to all Londoners, to all of the British people, the solidarity, the compassion and the friendship of France and the French people. [on London terrorist attacks, 7th July 2005]
|
Marriage is like a beleaguered fortress: those who are outside want to get in, and those inside want to get out
|
I don't know why you use a fancy French word like dtente when there's a good English phrase for it-cold war.
|
The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.
|
One must be truthful with oneself about one's own motives, especially if one is to survive in the world. It takes rigor, and it takes courage.
|
Today the heart of every French man and every French woman beats in unison with those of their brothers and sisters in Martinique,
|
We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.
|
Americans are just beginning to regard food the way the French always have. Dinner is not what you do in the evening before something else. Dinner is the evening.
|
When we don't have what we like, we must like what we have.
|
To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.
|