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Hey, boys and girls, great news, brought to you by the Foreign Languages Department! French Is Fun—Book 1, Fourth Edition has come out. This exciting book will help you attain basic communicative skills and get you ready for that vacation on the French Riviera that you’ve always dreamt of.

Of course, if your dreams are more modest (like surprising your French Facebook or Twitter friends with some French expressions) or utilitarian (you just need to review and reinforce what you know, so that you may fulfill that pesky foreign-language academic requirement), French Is Fun, Book 1 is there for you.

New Features in the Fourth Edition:

• Layout and design make lessons easier to navigate.
• Updated vocabulary and language reflects changes in usage in the 21st century.
• Added emphasis on conversational skills with several oral exercises in each lesson
• Updated Pages Culturelles (culture section) with new maps and information.
• An Internet activity in each lesson, La Chasse au trésor (Treasure Hunt), that gets students involved in a lively and interesting research.
• A comprehensive glossary of grammatical terms

• A consistent program sequence and clearly focused content topic in each lesson.
• A deductive learning approach guides students into making their own discoveries and draw their own conclusions.
• Lively drawings that introduce the vocabulary without the need for English.
• Entertaining narratives or playlets that feature new structural elements and vocabulary.

Beautiful work from 21-year-old French illustrator Romain Mennetrier, aka Brutal Moineau.

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Tags: french, Illustration, romain mennetrier

is at The Miss Rumphius Effect today.


A sleepover on Christmas Eve at the grandparents' in Baltimore is part of our holiday tradition, elegantly (if I say so myself) incorporated into our family's 12 Days of Yuletide. I got a lovely gift this year from my mother--two books of poetry, The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins and Voices by Lucille Clifton. Lucille (I stand in awe and yet presume a first-name basis) is one of my favorite Revered Adult Poets because of the brevity and simplicity of her writing, which enables her also to speak to the youngest children. If you don't know them, go find the Everett Anderson books soon. The variety in Voices is stunning, and I particularly liked this one and shared it with D the elder:

horse prayer

why was i born to balance
this two-leg
on my back to carry
across my snout
his stocking of oat and apple
why i pray to You
Father Of What Runs And Swims
in the name of the fenceless
field when he declares himself
master
does he not understand my
neigh

It reminded me of the following, which I once used as the basis for a writing project with Year 2 children in London:

The Prayer of the Little Ducks

Dear God,
give us a flood of water.
Let it rain tomorrow and always.
Give us plenty of the little slugs

Robert Bresson, one of the most highly regarded French filmmakers, created a new kind of cinema through meticulous refinement of the form’s grammatical and expressive possibilities.  In his book, Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film, Tony Pipolo provides a nuanced analysis of each of Bresson’s films, elucidating Bresson’s unique style as it evolved.  In the excerpt below, from the introduction, we learn about the importance of Bresson’s editing techniques. Tony Pipolo is Professor Emeritus of Film and Literature at the City University of New York.

Of all the elements of film that Bresson sought to refine, editing is perhaps the most critical, a category of rapports important not only to the rhythm of his films but to their underlying ethos.  Bresson employed continuity editing, shot-countershot, and crosscutting, but they all take on an urgency that is anything but standard.  Here lies the critical importance of looks in his films  With fierce clarity, their effect, figuratively speaking, is to empty the frame of any static pictorial tendency and direct us to the ongoing energies of the work, to each moment’s rapport with the next.  Gathering impetus befitting the surge of the narrative and its interstitial connection to form, looks are not just the eyes but also the pulse of each film, “bind[ing] persons to each other and to objects.”  It is through Fontaine’s looks in A Man Escaped, including those not actually directed at an object but registering an alertness to a distant sound, that we experience the environment of the prison, attuned to every move and anticipating every cut that leads to his freedom.  Looks are not the only generators of the cut, but they carry enough intensity even to penetrate and linger past a fade-out between shots.  Along with hands and doors, looks achieve an iconographic status in Bresson’s work well beyond the norm.

An equally important, no less elevated convention is the elliptical cut. As early as Les Anges we see that this technique is used not only to collapse space and time in the interest of narrative economy, but as an instrument of each film’s thematic trajectory.  In Les Anges key developments are elided, as if the film’s structure were ruled by the same urgency that seizes the protagonist, Anne-Marie.  The moral force underlying this welding of narrative and filmic form is an important aspect of Bresson’s cinema.

Not least of the forces behind the effectiveness of editing in Bresson is the way each shot is framed to isolate an action that by its very thrust anticipates a cut.  This becomes more prominent after Diary, when the style, drained of atmospheric and ornamental potential, concentrates on the primary action of a shot.  Its centrality is enforced by a more exacting concern for the rightness of a camera angle and of the moment to cut, both dictated by the essence of an action and its connection to an adjacent action.  The action, as implied above, may be simply the look of a protagonist so forcefully projected off screen by what Bresson called “the ejaculatory force of the eye” that it anticipates the cut.  This efficient use of filmic elements creates the impression of the unrepeatability of each shot, a remarkable feature of Bresson’s work and no small contribution to its realistic dimension.  Rather than depict, describe, or elaborate on action, the films are synonymous with action.  A description of thirty or forty sequential shots form virtually any section of his films from the mid-1

French illustrator Julien Pacaud is doing wonderful things with digital collage. His deft Photoshoppery and smart colour palettes make other cut-and-paste work seem like child’s play.

(via animinimalism)

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Tags: Collage, french, Julien Pacaud

One of the weird things about publishing a novel is it thrusts you into a public position even if you resist it. This never happened when I published poetry or parenting essays. Then I was just an anonymous mom who wrote for a little extra diaper money. Every once in a while, I would get a letter (the stamped kind in the mailbox) from someone who liked what I had written: always a mom, always with kids the same ages.

Now I get regular emails about writing or comments on the book, and teenage girls write to me pretty often. I get requests to read and "fix" manuscripts or I am asked to pass them along to my editor or agent. Kids ask me questions to get extra points on their book reports.

I was asked to speak at a luncheon the other day. The median age at that luncheon is around 78 -- I'm going to stand there and talk about an angsty girl who sets fires in the woods and speaks to fish that reside in her head?

The other day I got some books in the mail. At first, I couldn't figure out why anyone would send me books in French. I teach Spanish now and then, but French? Then I looked closer. This was MY book, in translation. (Seeing my own name gave it away...duh)

I forgot they might translate it. I was feeling very international when Emma walked up and looked at the cover.

"You wrote a book about a pink mermaid?" She was very excited.

"No. This is The Shape of Water. Only in French."

"The same book?" (disgusted, disappointed) "I thought you finally wrote something I would like."

So much for feeling international and writerly. This morning, someone found it and sent me the page review in French. I put it into the Google translator and this is what I got:

See availability in branch Flaky preparation nonavailable Summarized more The mother of Magda had always said that the world was filled with strange secrecies and marvellous qu' they only could see. But now qu' it n' was there, the world of Magda found itself bathed d' distresses and of loneliness, even of madness. When an imaginary family of fish quarreling started to torment it, the only discharge system of Magda was to cause splendid but destroying fires in the surroundings of the marshes, close to the house. The form of l' water draws a picture sinisterly lyric and surprising daily newspaper and of l' unreal, in which Magda starts to disentangle the secrecies of its family and to seek a stable place in the world.

I like it; I think it's sinisterly lyrical in its own Gallic way.

I really like the soft, simple illustrations of French artist Céline Artigau.

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Tags: Celine Artigau, french, Illustration

I tend to find myself irresistibly attracted to charming things -- which has led me into trouble far more often than not -- but these delightful French chickens were crying out for attention and how could I say no? I am far too easily persuaded :) They belonged to the friend of a friend and sat on her table, all round and smooth and quite a pleasure to behold. I've changed the colours but hopefully retained the simplicity of form and it turned out to be a simple yet extremely therapeutic and enjoyable drawing.

I also have a wonderful queue of requests for my type designs which is a great but pleasant surprise. I'm going through them all in between drawings, but here's the last one I managed to do, for my niece:

I'm pleased to say that the sticker for it won me a TBA Award at zazzle on the 28 August :) Thanks Marisa!

French Hen products at Floating Lemons at Zazzle

Marisa cherry pink products at Floating Lemons Type at Zazzle

I bought a bunch of sunflowers from the markets the other day, they are so wonderfully cheerful. It's also the first time in my life that I've seen fields absolutely full of sunflowers, a sea of bobbing yellows and oranges capturing the joys of the day, I love it.

Am not so crazy about the drawing though, I'm not quite sure why but it seems pale in comparison to the real thing. I haven't captured the vibrancy and am a bit disappointed -- maybe next time ...

Floating Sunflower cards and matching gifts at Floating Lemons at zazzle

By Anatoly Liberman

When the title of a scholarly article contains a general question (that is, a question beginning with a verb), the author’s answer is almost always “no” “Will people ever Speak One Language?” (No, they won’t). “Can Pidgins Tell Us Anything about the Beginning of Human Speech?” (No, they cannot). But don’t expect sensations from this post. Can you trust the etymologies provided by your dictionary? Yes, you can, though not unconditionally.

Most of the information we find in dictionaries is the result of consensus. What is the meaning of the noun moon? “A planet, a satellite of the earth.” And what is to moon? “To show signs of infatuation.” Anything else? “To spend one’s time in idle reverie.” Is that all? Not quite: also “to expose one’s bare buttocks.” How do we know those meanings? From experience: English speakers have agreed to assign them to that object and those actions. Is there a family name Moon? Sure. One can find it in any directory. The pronunciation of the word moon is another observable fact. But the origin of moon has to be recovered, and a plebiscite is not part of the procedure. In similar fashion, it matters not at all how many people believe that the moon is made of green cheese. Even if everybody is positive on this point, the conclusion will be wrong.

Language reconstruction is never a hundred percent secure. In a typical etymological thriller, the main witnesses have been dead for a long time or refuse to speak. Historical linguists are doomed to play the game of probabilities and are often satisfied with the least improbable rather than the most probable solution. The authors of etymologies are disadvantaged detectives, not seers. The public stays away from the lexicographical kitchen and has blind faith in dictionaries. This is an excellent thing, for despite the fashionable opinion that all knowledge is relative and that there is no reality (everything is allegedly a construct and depends on the point of view of the observer), we pine for the absolute. Rational human beings, when in doubt about a word, do not indulge in mooning (reverie); they look it up in a dictionary. Oh, yes, of course: a modern dictionary should be descriptive, not prescriptive. You, like, say irregardless, and this is your right, but good dictionaries (even though they appreciate your feelings, feel your pain, and are full of sympathy-empathy) should, like, gently advise you against such usage, and, as a rule, they do. However, when it comes to etymology, the best lexicographer can only say what is supposed to be right or express an informed opinion, and it is instructive to observe the change of these opinions.

Those who read this blog with some regularity must have noticed how often my discussion resolves itself into listing conjectures and trying to say something beyond “origin unknown.” Explanatory English dictionaries never, and specialized etymological dictionaries almost never, present a full picture of the debate surrounding word origins. This is due to the limitation of space, the editors’ natural wish to avoid technicalities that will scare the uninitiated (for etymology is as technical as chemistry, but dictionaries are published to be sold), the absence of a database that comprises everything researchers have written about the origin of English words, and the fear of beginning a comprehensive dictionary and never finishing it. It is irritating that we often have conflicting reports even on the origin of words created in recent memory; consider the history of Jeep, glitch, and most slang. Old words present graver problems. The list at my disposal is disconcertingly long, but two examples of what may be called etymological games will probably suffice.

Boy. In Old English, the proper name Boia was recorded, but its connection with boy remains a matter of debate. Boy surfaced in English texts only in the 13th century and at that time it meant “menial servant.” The sense “male child” emerged (or developed) later. Since boy goes back to Middle English, it might be a borrowing from French. However, despite the lack of clarity, most etymologists believed (note: believed) that the English word had a Germanic origin. The sole dissenting voice (we are in the year 1900 with it) made no impression on dictionary makers. But in 1940 a distinguished scholar, unaware of his predecessor’s work, again suggested that boy continues a French etymon. I deliberately skip all the forms and names, because it is only lexicographical practice that interests me here. The 1940 publication was hailed like a great discovery, and some of our most authoritative dictionaries changed tack. The Concise Oxford Dictionary is one of the best products of 20th-century lexicography. It authors thought that boy was Germanic, but the dictionary has been revised and updated many times. The 5th edition states that the origin of boy, “subject of involved conjectures,” is still undiscovered. The next two editions cite a French source. In the meantime, strong objections were raised to the 1940 article. As a result, the 8th and the 9th editions reproduced the statement of the 6th and the 7th with a question mark. The 10th edition says “origin unknown.” Sic transit… (Sorry for the unbearable cliché.)

Girl. Here is another Middle English word, and its origin has also been the “subject of involved conjectures.” This should not come as a surprise. Words for “child, boy, girl” often trace to metaphors and metonymies that are hard to trace. Especially common are the equations “child” = “twig, branch, offshoot; stump, piece of wood.” In Greek, Latin, Germanic, Romance, Celtic, and Slavic, etymologists face similar problems when it comes to the designation of children. Attempts to discover the etymology of girl and boy have in many respects been similar. As regards girl, only one thing is incontestable: -l is a diminutive suffix, so that girl is a little gir, whatever gir means. The root gir- is not isolated in Germanic, and it competes with gor- and gur-, both being the basis of the names of young creatures. Girl appears to have been borrowed from Low (that is, northern) German. But as early as 1855, it was suggested that girl continues Old English girla “dress,” a word that surfaced in several forms. Such a metonymy would not be unusual, for words for “girl” and “woman” often derives from the names of clothes (compare he runs after every skirt). The girla/girl etymology had little currency, though it was not forgotten. It received a second lease on life in a 1967 article by a leading American scholar (who—a familiar story—did not realize that he had rediscovered an old but usable wheel). The second edition of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (let it be noted, a splendid dictionary) incorporated it, and The Barnhart Dictionary of English Etymology treated it with respect. By contrast, the many modern offshoots of the OED hedge a little but prefer the traditional view (they say “probably related to the Low German form”). I think, if you are interested in my opinion, that boy is Germanic and girl was a borrowing from German.

Two examples, as I have said, will be enough. The situation is always the same. Dictionaries reproduce a certain view that is supposed to be safe. Then some iconoclast offers a different hypothesis. Some editors ignore it, while others jump on the bandwagon. Etymology is like medicine in that its prescriptions (recommendations) reflect not the truth but the state of the art. Should you trust your doctor? Indeed you should. And the same is true of your etymologist. May a clinic and a dictionary live long and be available to all, even though neither guarantees survival.

By Anatoly Liberman

There is no way one can stop folk etymologies from spreading. Whatever dictionaries may say, people will repeat anecdotes like the one current about the origin of posh, for example (supposedly, an acronym: port out, starboard home). Nonsense is quick-paced, whereas true knowledge stays at home Cinderella-like and no good fairy comes to the rescue. Although I have nothing new to say about bistro, another rebuttal of a popular version may be of some use. But first some table talk.

I have heard a story that is a little too good to be true, but its witty message outweighs its questionable veracity. When the great physiologist Ivan Pavlov, so the story goes, received an honorary degree from Cambridge, he had a speech written for him in English, a language he did not know. After he delivered it, someone from the audience approached him and said: “I have read that Russian is related to English, but I did not realize they were so close.” As a matter of fact, English (a Germanic language with a strong infusion of French and Latin words) and Russian (a Slavic language that absorbed numerous words from its eastern neighbors) are not too close, and in oral communication a heavy Russian accent makes English nearly unintelligible. The number of common Russian words in English is negligible (for how often does one mention samovar, pogrom, or the short-lived sputnik and perestroika?), and those that have broken through tend to appear in garbled form. One such borrowing is babushka “a woman’s headscarf,” usually stressed on the second (instead of the first) syllable. Piroshki ~ pirozhki “small meat pies” is also stressed on the second syllable (instead of the last; audio-Webster recommends final stress but to no avail), and the often-heard names (Borodin, the composer; Gorbachev, and others) are invariably mispronounced in the media). I do not know who taught the West the Russian toast na zdorov’e. Perhaps it existed in the past, but today it is a formula used in response to “Thank you!” at table (the hostess answers: “Na zdorov’e,” that is, “You are welcome”). The toast should be (Za) Vashe zdorov’e “(To) your health!” Time and again have I been told that the word bistro came to French with the Russian Cossacks after the defeat of Napoleon. The thirsty customers, who were not allowed to consume alcoholic beverages, allegedly rushed the owners of small drinking establishments shouting: “Bystro, bystro!” (“Quick, Quick!”). The French heard it so often that they began to call small cheap cafés bistro. The date of the episode and the exact identification of the invaders change from version to version, but the core of the anecdote is stable.

The implausibility of this etymology should have become obvious even to non-specialists long ago. First, perhaps the uniformed Russians, while in Paris, really suffered from the effects of the dry law, but why did the story single out the Cossacks? At that time, most soldiers in the Russian army were serfs. Second, any sensible person staying in a foreign country tries to learn a few phrases needed for the most elementary communication and refrains from giving a waiter orders he won’t understand. Third, an offensive command used by the soldiers of an occupying army hardly has a chance of becoming popular. Who in Paris would have adopted a meaningless Russian word for the designation of a local café? Hated foreigners are mocked, not imitated. Finally, if the command “be quick!” had been pronounced surreptitiously, the thirsty “Cossacks” would have whispered rather than shouted it, for fear of being overheard by an officer.

The other arguments against this folk etymology are of a more special nature. The Russian for quick, quick! is not bystro, bystro (stress on the first syllable) but at best the comparative degree of this adverb “bystrei, bystrei!” (stress on ei). The French may perhaps have identified the “mixed” (central) Russian vowel transliterated as y with their front i, but stress, as noted, falls on the first syllable of bystro, and its unstressed o resembles a in Engl. tuna. Consequently, the result would have been something like bistra. In French printed sources, the word bistro surfaced only in 1789, too late for the Cossack theory, whereas in Russia the Western legend of the origin of bistro is unknown, and those who are conversant with French life (even if only from literature) never associate bistro with bystro.

The allure of folk etymology is irresistible: it explains the origin of words in a way anyone can understand: no exposure to linguistics, with its pedantic insistence on sound correspondents and semantic verisimilitude, is required. Paste shines like diamonds and costs almost nothing, but its price is commensurate with its value. The real story behind French bistro remains unknown. French words whose beginning sounds like bistro are rather many: bistouille “a mixture of cheap wine and alcohol” (was this swill served in the first bistros?), bistre “a brown pigment made from the mixture of wood soot and water” (the color of the walls in the earliest bistros?), bistraud (an Anjou or Poitou dialectal word for a boy guarding herds; from “a little shepherd” to “a wine merchant’s aide,” apparently, a recorded sense, and “a place where wine is served”?), and bistingo “a bad cabaret” or bistringue “cabaret.” None of these putative etymons inspires confidence. Bistro seems to have emerged from the depths of street slang (like Engl. slum, for example), and, as often in such cases, the word’s origin is lost. I would add only one comment to what has been said above. Most, if not all, correct etymologies are simple and, while looking at them, one has the feeling that yes, the truth has indeed been found. Devious ways (from dirty walls to the name of a filthy place, from “a wine merchant’s helper” to “saloon,” and so forth) need not be avoided, for incredible semantic bridges have been discovered, but it is better to choose straighter paths. In defiance of the meaning of Russian bystro, French bistro is slow to reveal its (cheap? dirty?) secret.

Directed by Clément Soulmagnon, Yann Benedi, Sébastien Eballard & Quentin Chaillet, Gary is a lovely animated short that marries 2D and 3D into a charming illustrated storybook style.

Enjoy some mighty impressive work from French illustrator Veronique Meignaud.

From her illustration portfolio:

And from her sketchbook:

Visit her site or blog for more.

By Anatoly Liberman

For a long time, I have been meaning to join the mainstream and address, if not the importance of race in our life (and is there anything more important?), then at least the derivation of race. Why I am doing it now will become clear from my April “Gleanings.” (This is said to keep the readers of my blog in awful suspense for a whole week.) The English word was borrowed from French, and the speakers of many other European languages also added race to their vocabulary through French mediation, but its distant origin has been a matter of debate for more than a century. Only one fact seemed to be certain, namely that despite the success of race the story began with Italian razza. The debate raged only over whether, in Italian, razza was native (that is, going back to some Latin noun) or whether the Italians had taken it over from somewhere else. As a rule, the etymology of such intractable words remains unsolved forever, but in this case sufficient clarity seems to have been achieved for language historians to be able to give a satisfactory answer. A list of conflicting hypotheses is typical of the state of the art.

There was an old German noun reiza “straight line, stroke, mark” that Eugen Diez, the founder of comparative Romance philology, took for the etymon of razza ~ race. The semantic fit is good (compare the inner form of the noun lineage and phrases like line of descent; Diez also adduced a good parallel from French and Walloon), and even the vowels can perhaps be made to match, but the chronology militates against this reconstruction, for the German word went out of use rather early, while razza, with this spelling, surfaced in Italian only in the 13th century. The non-attested Langobardian raiza, meaning the same as reiza, can be dismissed as a lame attempt to save the situation, though it was offered by an outstanding specialist in Romance etymology (Langobardian is a Germanic language at one time spoken in the north of Italy; hence the name of the province Lombardy). Incidentally, all the conjectures being surveyed here stem from specialists, so that none of them is silly.

Another candidate for the etymon of razza was Latin radix “root.” Once again the semantic match is excellent. The phonetic difficulties are not insurmountable, as evidenced by the English noun race “root,” (compare Shakespeare’s a race of ginger) that does go back to radix or rather to radicem, its accusative (stress on the second syllable). Besides, Old and Middle French had racine “race,” obviously from radix. According to perhaps the most ingenious suggestion, razza is a clipped form of Latin generatio “generation” through naraccia (allegedly, from naraccia to una narazza and una razza). Clipped forms have always existed, and in English, which favors monosyllables, they play an outstanding role, but this method of producing words was little used in the past.

A rather bizarre derivation of race from Slavic raz “a blow” (a blow leaves its mark or imprint) died almost without issue, though Skeat’s predecessor Hensleigh Wedgwood, who used to string look-alikes from many languages, looked on this connection as possible. Arabic ra’s “head,” Basque arraca ~ arraza “male pedigree animal,” and Romance (unattested) raptiare “to breed falcons” (from raptiare to the verb racer and further to the noun), have also been tried. The Arabic etymon became well-known to the German readership thanks to the efforts of Eugen Oberhummer. The obsession with race in the Nazi time needs no explanation, but Oberhummer’s three articles (one was published in Austria, and two appeared in Germany) had no evil overtones, except that a reference to a Jewish scholar was withheld; however, one of them graced the infamous journal for Rassenkunde, literally “race-lore, the study of race.”

All the suggestions mentioned above share an important weakness. They are, to a varying degree, plausible from a linguistic point of view but have no foundation in the history of the concept. To decide how a word for “lineage, pedigree” originated, we should know who needed it, that is, in what circumstances it was coined and how it spread from one layer of speakers to another. An abstract reconstruction, based only on the interplay of sound and meaning, is bound to remain a shot in the dark. Only two hypotheses go beyond intelligent guessing. Latin ratio “account, calculation; reason” also meant “order, law, system, way,” and already in the early Middle Ages it could designate “type, kind, species.” Italian razza developed, as it seemed, from ratio and, with phonetic variants, became a household word in the rest of Europe. This etymology ran into several chronological difficulties, but, on the whole, it made sense. Leo Spitzer, whose name turns up every time I touch on a Romance subject, did not invent it, but he was its main proponent, and the most influential scholars, with few exceptions, agreed with him. (Those who disagreed defended much less attractive derivations.) It did not escape the proponents of this theory that the French word race was often applied to horses, and Spitzer accounted for the popularity of the word by referring to the role of horsemanship.

The most significant breakthrough happened in 1959, when Gianfranco Contini published an article in which he showed that an old Italian author had used razza while translating the French noun haras “stud” (to anticipate the natural question: most probably, haras has nothing to do with the English verb harass). He concluded that the etymon of race was French haras, which lost its initial h (as always), and that Italian razza, far from being the etymon of race, was an adaptation of the French noun. I’ll skip the morphological complications that have been dealt with rather well and mention only one fact. A chance gloss in a translated text would not have gone far enough to explain a swift adoption of race by the French (after all, it could have been a case of folk etymology, almost a pun, with the French author being seduced by the similarity of the two forms), but subsequent research showed how race ~ razza progressed in Italian and French, and there is no reason to doubt its results. All the pieces of the puzzle suddenly fell into place. It could have been expected that race would emerge not as a bookish creation but as a term of cattle or horse breeding (whatever the etymology of haras may be) and that it would be applied to humans later. Indeed, in Dante’s Italy razza was used only about animals; for people the word schiatta existed. Both Italian schiatta “stock, descent, lineage” (to say nothing of razza) and French haras “stud” have continued into the present (compare di nobile schiatta “of noble descent”). As we have seen, the true connection had been suspected early enough: Arabic ra’s, Basque arraza, and Spitzer’s reference to chivalry and horsemanship should not be overlooked, but in all those theories horses, falcons, and so forth played an accidental role, whereas they should have been the focus of the investigation.

So now we know how race came into being, but a short addition may not be out of place. New words, whether native coinages or borrowings, have a better chance of survival if, once they surface, they find support from other words. Perhaps ratio would not have yielded race on its own, but race, from haras, met a powerful ally, for ratio, which became its homonym, also meant “species” (among other things). Even generatio, a more distant ally, may have helped race to stay. Accidental and folk etymological ties play a significant role in the life of words. (Engl. race “a rush forward” is not related to race “pedigree,” horse races notwithstanding.)

Class and sex were also promised in the title. They were used as a lure, I am sorry to say. Like race, both are Romance words. Sexus, from Latin via French, is probably akin to the verb secare “to cut” (compare section). Class is a direct borrowing of Latin classis. The sense “division of persons or things” goes back to the 17th century. In the 16th century, class “division of the Romans; a group in a university” occurred in Scots. Latin classis meant “fleet; muster of citizens.” Its origin is obscure, and the explanations in older dictionaries and compendia should be treated with great caution.

The race may be to the swiftest, but in etymological studies the hedgehog has every advantage over the hare, if reference to the famous tale from the Grimms is allowed.

I’ve just spent far too long pouring over these wonderfully executed jam comics from some of the French comics community’s finest members. Championnat de bras de fer (Championship Arm Wrestling, or arms of iron literally), pits the artists against each other in arm wrestling bouts that turn the collaborative art of jam comics into an all-out bloodsport.

The tournament-style jam is in its second stage of duels, and the entire thing features some of of the world’s best cartoonists such as Lewis Trondheim, Dupuy and Berberian, and Frederik Peeters to name a few. And if you don’t speak French, not to worry — the cartooning here is so expressive and creative, that most if not all of these work entirely as pantomime strips. I can’t wait for the next round.

I would like to share with you a little 5" x 5" catalog I picked up while I was in France. Its for the company Djeco and it manufactures some amazing toys. It is the most well designed catalog I've seen in a long time!

It combines beautiful illustrations by Gwen Keraval with photos of their products. Imagine all the work involved! Here are some spreads:

And last but not least- A cluck cluck to Edrian Thomidis- who were in NYC and we got to meet and chat about illustration and design. Thank you for the lovely conversation! It was a pleasure to meet you and your husband!

Bonjour! I'm back from my trip to France and had a great time! We visited Strasbourg, which was about a two and a half hour train ride from Paris. My deary was a on a business trip there, so what a great excuse for me to tag along :-)

I LOVE the French illustration style and aesthetic. In particular I was looking for this book by one of my favorite illustrators Marc Boutavant:
I've been wanting this book for so long now! Its very hard to get it in the US (it is on ebay, but very $$$). What a beautiful book!!! Then in another store I found stickers by Marc Boutavant too:
And the cutest little notebook and Christmas Alphabet postcard by Illustrator Marion Billet:
I love "Fake ads" -Postcards by illustrator Amandine Piu:
And of course how can I resist this one (also by illustrator Amandine Piu):
Our high school French got us around ok but I must admit it was mentally draining afterwards. Having a language barrier is a handicap and there were a few awkward situations. Then I thought about all the non-English speaking people who are brave enough to come to the US to make a life for themselves (including my parents.). Props to them most definitely!

Anyways, I already miss the cafes and pain au chocolats. Strasbourg is a very quaint city to visit. Too bad I didn't get to see much of Paris, only the airport and the few blocks around the train station. Next time!

French designer/llustrator Olivier Marboeuf. Plenty more in his portfolio, which comprises just over 60 images.

(Thanks, Luc)

Guillaume Ninove creates these stunning pieces that are somewhere halfway between sculpture and collage. My first thought was that these strange architectural landscapes with distorted perspective would make brilliant set pieces for some animation. And what do I find when I click on ‘Animation’ on Guillaume’s site?