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Happy Dictionary Day! In honor of this wonderful holiday we thought we would introduce you to the Oxford Language Dictionaries Online (OLDO). With over 1.4 million words and phrases you could spend the whole day (and even the whole year) exploring other languages. Lucky for you, OLDO is free through Sunday the 21st. Use this link to start your word travels. Throughout the day we will be have some fun quizzes to help you expand your vocabulary in French, German, Spanish and Italian. First up is French. Try the questions below and then hit “more” to see how well you did. If you are stuck use OLDO for help!

Question 1: A Belgian French student tells you she has “une heure de fourche” today. What does she mean?

Question 2: French has two words that translate the English river - what’s the difference between them?

Question 3: Which French speakers would refer to France’s victory in the 1998 FIFA World Cup as being in “nonante-huit”?

Question 4: When would you hear people shouting “allez les Bleus”?

Question 5: Most English speakers know the French word “eau”; but what is special about “eau de vie”?
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I started typing The Graveyard Book today. I'm chugging my way through chapter one. Starting to recover from Comic-con although it's not yet ten o'clock and I'm ready to sleep already...

I love Charles Bukowski, and tend to buy his books in Scandinavia. Also I love classic Peanuts. I was doubtful that I'd love this reimagining of Peanuts as written by Bukowski, but I'm happy to say that I did. http://www.progressiveboink.com/archive/peanuts-by-charles-bukowski/

Neil --
In the Coraline premiere photo that you linked to a few days ago, you are making two fists on the red carpet as though you are going to leap forward after the flash and pummel someone. I take this to be an indication of some nervousness -- after all these events, is it still common for you to get butterflies? Shawn

The Stardust premiere you mean. Coraline will be next year. no, I don't get butterflies, but I don't enjoy things like red carpets,: you have to imagine about a hundred or so photographers, all shouting (at the same time, not one after another) "Neil, Neil -- look over here!" "Neil, to your right!" and so on, and me trying desperately to remember how to stand up and not look stupid or goofy, and knowing that I'll always be looking at the wrong photographer and, honestly, it's a lot like having people throw rocks at you, except without the pain and the bleeding and the ripped clothes. So it's not really like having rocks thrown at you. But still.

My friend and I recently both ate up "Stardust," because we both want to see the movie and are weird about reading the books that movies are based off of before we see the movie. However, after reading the book and watching the previews, we're both pretty much prepared to see an almost completely different story when we go to see the movie. As the author, how did you feel about the movie version of "Stardust"?

I think you'll be extremely pleasantly surprised. I think it's a lovely movie, and that it's a movie, not a book, and those places where they changed things to make it work as a movie, work just fine. And I think that it's nothing at all like the trailer.

Stardust currently has 100% on rottentomatoes.com!

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/stardust/

And I've seen two people compare it to Princess Bride.

That's nice. It probably won't stay at 100%, but it's a lovely place to start. (And I don't think it means very much, alas. Princess Mononoke was the highest-rated Rotten Tomatoes film of its year, and nobody really noticed.)