RELEASED: allout-vim 031229

John J. Lee jjl at pobox.com
Mon Jan 5 11:13:55 EST 2004


François Pinard <pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> [Alexander Schmolck]
> > François Pinard <pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
> 
> > > In French, we easily use "formidable" to describe a girl who is
> > > wonderfully sympathetic and/or attractive.
> 
> > I think sympathetic is another of those false friends :)
> 
> Indeed, thanks!!  I just looked it up in a dictionary...
[...]

François, your English is good enough to be comprehensible 99% of the
time, and bad enough to be endearing.  If you get any better at it,
people will start to take all your words seriously, and *then* you'll
be in trouble <0.5 wink>.

Of course, you don't always get the whole truth from dictionaries.  I
remember my sister and I laughing at the translation in our school
French textbook of "zut" as "bother".  "Bother" must be the mildest
swearword (if you can call it that) in the English language --
comically so.  We were of the opinion that a word that's so clearly
designed to be spat must be at least two notches up in vulgarity.  :-)

(Now, how do I make a transparent pretence of remaining OT...)
Thankfully, Python doesn't have that problem.

No, actually, a *real* OT comment: I'm pretty sure I've seen two big
pieces of code, by two French authors, in which the word "eventually"
is used all over the place, in a way that clearly means something to
French people <wink>.  "eventually" --> "finally", perhaps?  I don't
think it's as simple as that, though.  One example:

http://pybliographer.org/


John



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