Last night I was flicking through an Agatha Christie book and I was struck at how much French she'd bung into her stories. Not just the occasional bit of Hercule Poirot dialogue but whole paragraphs of the indecipherable gunk. And always italicised - just in case you didn't cotton on that you were reading another language.
When I was a kid I'd treat these chunks like any other word I didn't know: I'd just leap right over it and carry on. Then when I was in high school I'd feel pretty alright about being able to translate it.
Now my French is somewhat oxidised and I'm happy to just get the gist of it and think to myself, "That Agatha was a pretentious old biddy, n'est-ce pas?"
Ca va sans dire.
4 comments:
It goes without saying.
I hate it when they do that in movies too. It usually comes at the most crucial time when you really need to know what's going on. So I didn't do all that well at French in high school. I don't need some film maker to rub it in 20 or 30 years later.
Rodney - mais oui!
Karen - well, I would expect YOU to say that.
A bit of French I can deal with, mainly because subtitles shit me.
However, when some old wanker like Patrick White or Morris West start dabbling in Latin, I get a bit cranky.
Context is one thing. Pretence quite another.
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