Monday 2 July 2012

The woman at the next table

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


2 July

She is talking in French - I know that - but I think that she is playing a private game, a bit as barristers do with patterns of words that they try to get past judges:

Ten minutes ago, she said crapeau, a word that anyone who studied the language to 'A' level seems destined to have been taught. (Probably, Eddie Izzard would know why.)

Then, a few minutes later, it was drapeau, and a sound-world was emerging, if not, for want of desire to follow this well-enuniciated French (unlike that rather throaty, self-swalowing kind of her interlocutor), which I think that I could, any obvious other connection.

I believe that there may be a word frap[p]eau* - will that leap out at me next?


End-notes

* Although, now that I check, Google thinks that I have got crapeau wrong, and wants to offer me crapaud instead - twice. As to frappeau, maybe not, but there's frappé, and even - with crapaud - grapaud.

Ô!


No comments: