French words of the day: aperitif, canapé, emigré

At meal times and in supermarkets you meet and need to know lots of French words, such as baguette, a long bread roll.

You start your meal with an aperitif, a drink supposed to stimulate saliva and the appetite. At a cocktail party you would be offered a canapé , a small but exquisitely prepared and garnished savoury morsel of food.

Perhaps you will meet other expats, or emigrés. People who have emigrated.

By the way, the letter e at the start of an English word often comes from the Greek word exit, going out. I remember sitting on a Greek aeroplane and seeing letters above the door. I wondered what they mean. I identified two of the letters, x and d and s. Suddenly I knew. The word was exodus, same as the word for the book of the old testament. I had found the word for exit!

 In or en means coming in. So the immigrant is coming into the country. The emigrant is leaving, going out.

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

French mushrooms, mushroom picking, making quick, easy mushroom soup

We were given mushrooms by a French woman who was on a group holiday and kindly gave mushrooms to everybody in the group. A mixture of champignons, or button mushrooms, and ceps, also known as porcini.

The French go out gathering mushrooms. A French pharmacist will have a book or poster identifying mushrooms which are safe to eat. In any case, local people will know their local mushrooms.

In English supermarkets we can buy the small button mushrooms which are a handy size for cooking or adding to a salad at lunchtime. We can also buy the big flat mushrooms you can stuff like a bowl for a starter or lunch or vegetarian meal.

From time to time you see those small headed mushrooms with the long stalks.

What you never see in supermarkets are the pretty red mushrooms so loved by illustrators of children's books because the mushrooms are colourful and attention getting. Think of the red as a red light saying stop. They are deadly poisonous.

On a press trip I met a girl who had worked on a food magazine. I asked if they had ever made any mistakes or got any complaints. She said once an outside illustrator had added a photo of the poisonous mushroom to the page of mushroom recipes.

My jaw dropped in horror. I asked, "Did you get any complaints?"

"No."

I was even more shocked. "Did anybody die? All your readers!"

"No. We did get some feedback much later. A reader said she'd tried three supermarkets and nobody stop stocked them. And our local supermarket manager said he'd had lots of requests for a mushroom he couldn't get from any of his suppliers."

Meanwhile, remembering this story of the magazine and the mushrooms, I looked suspiciously at mushrooms which popped up, uninvited, in our garden in England. I don't think I have a photo. 

But these mushrooms grew on a doormat in England. We did not risk eating them. Does anybody know what they were?

Safe or not?
The first thing I did was google safe and poisonous mushrooms to be sure our friendly supplier in France had not made a mistake.

Then we looked for recipes. We made a big 'soup' of mashed up mushrooms. A mixture of cep and champignons. The mushrooms were so tasty!

Wikipedia says champignons are known in English by the popular name button mushrooms.

On the way around my internet search I came across advice on what to do when gathering mushrooms.  It said you take care of three things. Two are:

1 Use a wicker basket so the mushrooms can drop their 'spores' as you carry them, to create more mushrooms.
2 You do not pick the small mushrooms, only the larger ones, for the same reason, to ensure a crop from the spores released by the full size mushrooms.

Who'd have known! So next time you drive through France and see the mushroom pickers with their baskets, or hunt for mushroom recipes, or pick or grow your own, think of the mushroom gatherers in France.

The most famous and delicious mushrooms are truffles with a smokey flavour. Very expensive, but a little goes a long way. You could buy a teeny pot as a present for yourself or another member of your family, then make a mushroom omelette for everybody.

Mushroom soup is easy to make. You hardly need a recipe. Just wash them, chop them up, simmer gently in butter. No need to add water if you have lots of mushrooms and want a thick 'soup' like a dip. Add water if you want a thin soup, which the French call a 'consommé'. The recipe we looked at suggested adding a herb, thyme. We did not have fresh herbs so we added dried thyme.

I looked for a list of mushroom names. The plant sites have pages and pages of mushroom names, very comprehensive, and who would have imagined that there were so many. But the lists are so long you cannot find what you want and grow bored. The cookbook site I have mentioned below was more useful to me.

I was surprised to see in addition to the prized internationally known French truffle, there are also Texas truffles. I thought I'd add them because they will be news to my English readers and of interest to my readers in the USA, and American readers are more numerous so I always look for something to interest those living in the USA.

Later a cook given the mushrooms lunched on a British favourite, bacon, egg on toast and mushrooms.

Mushroom Names
champignon
cep
French truffle
fly agaric (red and poisonous)
Texas truffle

http://www.wildmushroomsonline.co.uk/Wild-Mushrooms-in-France/index.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iFi3YrIo7o (How to grow your own mushrooms from spores)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore
http://www.mssf.org/cookbook/names.html
http://www.wildmushroomsonline.co.uk/Identifying-Edible-Mushrooms-The-Cep/index.php

To identify mushrooms from pictures:
http://www.first-nature.com/fungi/~id-guide.php

Angela Lansbury, BA, travel writer and photographer, author, speaker.

Travel the world at London Toastmasters Clubs in England

LONDON TOASTMASTERS

In London you can go to six foreign language toastmasters clubs:

1 Experience French, meets at Fitzrovia Centre near Goodge Street station.

http://experience-french.org

2 London Italian -almost reached the 20 members needed to start a club

3 London Portuguese

4 Polish your Polish

5 Russian—English

6 Spanish Speakers 

- at the Plumbers Arms, 5 minutes from Victoria station, upstairs

It's easy to translate their welcome page using Google translate.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author, speaker.
ACG Advanced Communicator Gold

French words of the day: broderie anglaise

Many technical terms are French, not only in cooking. Café everybody knows. Café Royale is royal cafe. Vis à vis, one might say, face to face. Visage is face.

In the house we have French windows. Years ago I was told that the French think what we call French windows are English windows, but I cannot find any confirmation of this on the internet. When you think about it, they are not windows but doors. Sometimes called French doors, or casement windows.
porte-fenêtre the hat on the e indicates the lost letter s, as in nest

Indoors we sit dressmaking. In dressmaking we come across moire silk and broderie anglaise.
Broderie anglaise - English embroidery, yet we in England use the French words as if we consider it is something French. The style of embroidery is cutwork or holes, often a series of small holes in a repeated pattern with scalloped or curved, each hole edged with close parallel lines stitching.

A great friendship and travel for business and pleasure between two nearby countries, England and France, or the USA and Canada.

Angela Lansbury, English and French tutor, speaker, author.

French speaking Toastmasters Club: Tips, problems and solutions for speakers and audience

I thought I spoke fluent French and would have no trouble understanding French at a French speaking Toastmasters international club in Singapore. What I had hoped to learn were the correct technical terms and forms of address for a meeting, so that I could use them without hesitation.

My first setback was on arrival. I was left as the third spectator (in English we would say wallflower) while the president chatted quietly in rapid fire French to the VPE (for non Toastmasters the Vice President of Education is the executive handling paperwork and organisation).

Whilst I thought it would be rude to intrude on a private meeting, I had hoped to accustom myself to the cadence and inflection of french pronunciation. I also hoped to remind myself of frequently used phrases. As the French might say, the cliché. They might also have been using slang (argot) or dialect (patois).

However, I soon found that I was only understand half or three quarters of every sentence. With one sentence in three inaudible, the coherence of the conversation was a guessing game.

French Names
The fact that I did not know the people attached to the names was another stumbling block. Pierre or Peter could not do something or other. Alex or Alexandre would do something. I had been prepared for a few French pronunciations of names. Olivier, as in Lawrence Olivier, was not such a challenge. But it was a surprise that so many names were totally different.

Planned Speeches - Speak Slowly
The planned speeches were hard to follow. Some nervous speakers spoke extra fast. I remembered what we are so often told in Toastmasters training meetings. Slow down. Members of the audience who do not speak your language (English) as a first language will find it hard to follow if you speak too fast. For the first time I was listening to a speaker in a foreign language and really appreciated the problems faced by members of the audience.

To sum up: When speaking to an audience where your language is a second language for members of the audience:
1 Speak slowly. Pause at the end of each sentence.
2 Install a French-English dictionary on your phone - one not dependent on having an internet connection. Download it.
http://www.interglot.com/dictionary/en/fr/translate/drunk
3 Use lots of visual aids.
4 Ask members of the audience to raise their hands if you say a word they don't understand. If you don't wish to stop, an assistant (the SAA at a Toastmasters International meeting) can write the word on the board, or note the name of the person with the query, to be answered at the end.
5 Don't interrupt a speaker. Ask if you may record their speech. Afterwords check the words in the dictionary.
6 Provide a copy of your speech as a handout, including a glossary of technical terms or a translation into the languages of members of the audience.
7 Feedback forms could include a question asking if you used words which the audience wanted translated.

Meeting False Friends
The French use the term faux amis or false friends to apply to words which mean different things in different languages.

For example, the French word for meeting is reunion, which in Singapore Toastmasters means the regular monthly meeting. In English a reunion usually takes place on the anniversary a year later, or several years later, of people who met on holiday, or went to school together.

Argot and Patois
When I returned to Paris after a two or three year break, I was astonished to see Graffiti everywhere with slogans I could not understand. My friends translated. The first word was a rude word. The second word was the nickname of a political personality.

Table Topic - Sloshed, tipsy
In Toastmasters I had a different problem. The topics master read out what seemed a long question: If your husband was ...., would you a) have an alcoholic drink, b) have a non-alcoholic drink, c) take a holiday in Indonesia. Why? I followed everything except the magic, essential word.

My friend Carolyn who is a member of the club, and I assumed was more up to date that I was, admitted she was equally mystified on first hearing the word during the meeting. She had been able to whisper a question to one of her fellow members and get the translation. The word was drunk, or as the English would say in slang, tipsy.

Tipsy Topic
Looking at the English I was surprised by the number of slang words we have for inebriated, with help from Wiktionary. Sloshed matches the initial letter of the French. Other words are: boozy, dead drunk, drunk as a lord, happy, inebriated, merry, p i s s e d, plastered, tight, tipsy, sloshed, sizzled, out of it, s h i c k e r (Yiddish), tight as a drum.

If an English person expects a foreigner to understand all of these terms, any of which we might use in a speech, it is not too much to expect English speakers to grasp one new word in French. soul - a merry soul wearing a hat soûl .

(To print the hat, you press down the key for U, hold it down, up pops a list of the letter U with various signs above. The hat is number one. No good pressing on the guide in the pop up. It is telling you to press the key for 1 whilst holding down the letter U.)

I would have understood words sounding like ivrogne and alcoholique, but not the other words.

Useful Links

1 Singapore French speaking toastmasters club meets monthly. Visitors welcome. Phone in advance to confirm venue. Phoning in advance is a courtesy to ensure the club puts out sufficient chairs, has sufficient catering. They will also want to welcome VIPs and visitors in the opening address, and on the agenda.

2 Meetup French speaking group in Singapore meets weekly. (Others exist in London, England and elsewhere. If none are handy in your country, start your own on Meetup.)
http://www.meetup.com/The-Singapore-Francophiles-Meetup-Group/
http://www.meetup.com/The-Singapore-Francophiles-Meetup-Group/events/222865584/

3 Toastmasters International has French language manuals and manuals in several other language including Spanish, Chinese (Mandarin), Arabic, Russian, Japanese.

4 French club in Toronto, Canada
http://englishfrench.toastmastersclubs.org/directions.html

5 Experience French, toastmasters club in London, England.
http://experience-french.org

Angela Lansbury
ACG (Advanced Communicator Gold - meaning completing the basic training manual of ten speeches and six more manuals containing 5 speech projects).

French words of day for my diary or speech and yours: debonair

I collect French words whenever I see them in a newspaper or magazine or one pops up in conversation. I make a list on the notes page in my diary. i divide the page up into letters of the alphabet. You could do the same.

Today's word is debonair. Like the air of a debutante, making her debut, confident, well-dressed.

Oh, dear. In the Sunday Times in an article on Roman orator Cicero I have just found the word arriviste. One who arrives. A bit like nouveau riche. Shades of jumped up.

Other words which popped up: Physique. (I'll give you an example: He walks around in the open air and runs and has a great physique.) Repertoire. (He is a good orator and has a huge repertoire of amusing stories.) Coup d'tat. (Unfortunately there was a coup d'etat.) Regime. (This resulted in a change of regime.)

If you are a meticulous or obsessive person, you could note the word down in your diary and list the source. At the end of the year you might be able to collate the results along the lines of:
A french word appeared in The Sunday Times, 400 times (I am making up the figures as an example) and A French word appeared in The Daily Mail 200 times. The most frequently used word was ....

Who would have use for such facts? This summer I went to Singapore and visited a Francophone Toastmasters international speakers club at the Alliance Francaise where the meeting was all in French. I believe similar clubs exist in London, Canada and French speaking countries of Europe such as France, Belgium and Switzerland.

If you are called on to speak at such a club, as the President giving the opening address, or a visitor invited to do a table topic, or a member preparing a planned speech, you could use your statistics on the numbers of French words used in English.

If you are an English speaker, at beginner French level, preparing your first speech, you can construct a speech more quickly if you have a list of words you already know from English.

Angela Lansbury, English and French teacher and tutor, speech tutor, speaker, author.

Watford, 24 hour food and match day parking

Watford has an often confusing one way system but it offers lots of opportunities if you learn where you are going. 24 hour opportunities. For example, the giant Tesco is a 24 hour option six days a week. Except Sunday. (Check their website for 24 hour stores around the UK.)

Saturday night they are open. But it's hard to get near their complex on a match day. Here's another option.

The garage at the bottom of the hill as you try to get out of Watford, coming from the church or the hospital, offers a car wash, free parking with a car wash on match days, and 24 hour off license.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author, speaker.