French words of the day: baguette, baguettes, exposé, macabre, milieu

What's the difference between a baguette and baguettes? In an English bakery or supermarket, a baguette is a long French roll, with a hard, crisp outside and soft middle full of holes.

However, if you ask for baguettes in a Chinese restaurant in France you will get chopsticks. Presumably the bread roll is named after chopsticks because of its shape, or vice versa.

In an old newspaper I was about to throw away I spotted a French word, milieu. The writer describes himself as being in or near somebody else's milieu. Their, hm, that's why we use the French word, because it's hard to find an English equivalent. Milieu= (middle) surroundings, the place a person inhabits or places he moves around in, not a specific place but surroundings, their circle of friends and acquaintances, such as political, religious, income group, intellectual, and so on. For example, in my twenties I was in the student milieu, then in the business milieu, in the education milieu, and so on.

I had to look back at the word as I typed it. How do you remember the spelling? Think of it as the French for middle and place. Mi lieu.

You pronounce lieu as lee - er

French au plein milieu - right in the middle
banlieu - surburb
lieu - place
milieu(x) - real or metaphorical surroundings (pronounce me lea er) . For plural add x.
You get several example of use in a big dictionary
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/translate/french-english/milieu

Later, looking at wines, we found the grape m a ca b e o and thought of the French word macabre. To do with death.

danse - dance - an easy word, same except for the spelling
La danse macabre - the dance of death
macabre - gruesome

Then I saw exposé.

exposé - un exposé noun an article or news report which exposes or reveals something which is bad or scandalous
http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-french/exposé

Angela Lansbury, English teacher and tutor, speaker, writer, author.

French words of the day: de rigeur; memoir; milieu; resistance; unique

Collecting French words for me is d e  r i g e u r. (I need to divide up the word to prevent the predictive text / spell check from covering the word into rigour.)  I shall note French words and count them for my memoir.

amateur - not professional, inept
brogue - kind of walking shoe
coiffure - hairstyle
critique - article criticising or rather judging the good and bad aspects of whatever is being reviewed
de r i g eur - obligatory
espionage - spying
memoir - memories - written as a selection of related incidents from one's life, usually on a theme (memoir of restaurants / religious experiences) or from your career ( for example, My life an an actor / space traveller). Or a time (for example, my life as a student in the Sixties) and /or a place (San Francisco in the Nineties).
longeur - over long and tedious
milieu - for example middle class milieu - surroundings, atmosphere
passé - out of date / dated / past its sell by date, no longer fashionable
Resistance - French Resistance against German occupation in WWII
piece de resistance - finest work, usually artistic such as a best novel or play or painting or the last song of a concert
surveillance - clandestine watching
unique - one of a kind
fille unique - only child

I used to teach English and occasionally French.
Angela Lansbury, B A Honours, author, speaker.