During our visit with Stephanie’s cousins, we got into a discussion about how to pronounce des haricots verts (some green beans).

Haricots Verts by Dominique Sanchez

There’s this thing in French called a liason where the eerily silent letters at the ends of words are resuscitated if the following word begins with a vowel. So for instance les (the, plural) is usually pronounced [lay] but when it’s followed by enfants (children), the “s” reappears and it sounds like [layz] as in [layz-on-fon].

In the case of des haricots verts, or more specifically des haricots, according to the older generation (which includes Stephanie) it is pronounced [day air-e-koh] with a perceptible hiatus after [day], because, well, haricots doesn’t begin with a vowel dammit!—even though the “h” isn’t pronounced. However, the younger generation, innovative whippersnappers that they are, have apparently begun to pronounce it [dayz-air-e-koh], creating a liason between des and haricots, promoting the otherwise silent “s” at the end of des to a loud and proud “z”—and I’m sure causing French parents everywhere no end of angst.

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For some reason I enjoy re-wordifying acronyms that have themselves become words.

• Eff Why Eye
• Double You Tea Eff
• Oh Em Gee
• Ay Pee Eye
• Tea El Ay

So I decided to create a complete alphabet of words for letters. A, H, and Q were the hardest. E is impossible to define in terms of other letters. Some are real words, others are just onomatopoeic. It occurs to me that outside of the United States, Z would be Zed. Otherwise I think the rest are pretty consistent among the English-speaking world.

Reading Andrew Purvis’ Running on empty carbs piece in the Guardian brought to light an unusual number of words and phrases in British English that I didn’t know (or would have used a more common American English surrogate for). So I decided to list them out and look them up.

queue

a line – as in “to stand in line”. pretty much everyone knows this one.

weaned

raised – as in “their children were raised on Happy Meals”

19 stone

a stone is a unit of mass equal to 14 pounds, thus 19 stone = 266 pounds

Brabantia bin liner

given the context I can only imagine these are upscale garbage bags

refuse truck

a garbage truck (obviously)

wormery

this one is my favorite: a compost bin!

Somerfield bags

used in contrast to the Brabantia bin liners, I can only imagine these are down-market garbage bags

council flat

apparently a form of public housing, aka a housing project

Turkey Twizzlers

this was a new one, they are apparently “spiral strips of processed meat are manufactured by the giant Bernard Matthews food company.” think: curly fries made out of meat. awesome!

fizzy drinks

soda (duh)

lardy

fat

netball

this one was also completely new to me, apparently it’s like basketball without a backboard

muesli bar

granola bar

ready-salted

already salted, as in “not unsalted” (I think)

furry deposits

creative way of saying fatty deposits

orange squash

a concentrated sugary beverage that one adds water or seltzer to

unpicking

unpacking, further investigation?

i used to expound on this theory of interpreting signs from fate, especially in terms of social interaction.

it kind of went like this: if someone caught my attention three times, i should interpret that as fate whacking me on the head saying “do something”–like breaking the familiar stranger routine and striking up some kind of conversation.

this also applies to unfamilar words and concepts, except usually it only takes hearing something novel once or twice before i heed fate’s divine intervention and look it up.

this reminds me of a phenomenon which struck me so profoundly when i was younger (perhaps in elementary school) that i remember the following anecdote to this day.

we had learned in school that the word utensil was another word for forks, knives, and spoons. what was extraordinary was my dad using the word utensil that night (or within a few days) and my knowing exactly what he meant, but also realizing that a few days earlier i would have had no idea what he meant. and maybe the word would have passed right over my head like i’d never heard it, because i don’t think i was in the habit of stopping my parents at every unknown word to ask for a definition.

in that moment i had some awareness that i had been unconscious of my ignorance in the past, which suggested that i could possibly be unconscious of my ignorance in the present. or perhaps it was just my first known realization and appreciation of a coincidence. either way, it stuck with me.

i am constantly looking up words online. sometimes just to check the spelling, but often just to make sure the word i’m using in a blog post or email actually means what i think it means. it’s also fun to look up uncommon words other people use that you’ve heard before, and have a sense of, but aren’t familar with the actually definition. here are some words i’ve looked up for various reasons lately:

screed
coalesce
scavenge
preternatural

so i wish there was an automatic way that the words i look up could get posted to my blog in a sidebar that showed the last five or so, with links to their definitions on merriam webster.