April 2007

To be no Spring chicken

April 25, 2007

When I wrote my entry about Spring, I came across the expression "to be no Spring chicken". I mentally translated it as "ne plus être tout jeune" (to no longer be quite as young as one used to be). However,...

French election: the lexical world of the candidates

April 20, 2007

On Sunday, I’ll be going to London to cast my vote in the first round of the French presidential elections, along with some of the other 100,000 French expats who live in the area. This being a language blog, I...

Spring

April 18, 2007

Origin: bef. 900; OE spring and spryng The sense of the season of the year after winter (when plants spring up) is first recorded in springtime (before 1398, in Trevisa's translation of Bartholomew's De Proprietatibus Rerum), but is found in...

To have egg on one's face

April 17, 2007

Listening to the news this morning, I heard the following statement: " The hostage situation has left Britain with egg on its face". "To have egg on one's face" means to be very embarrassed or made to look silly. There...

Teraflop

April 13, 2007

Last year, the firm unveiled a chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflops) (…) Teraflop comes from tera (1012) and FLOP. Tera comes from the Greek word for "monster", which was...

Tartare

April 12, 2007

This is the steak tartare we had for lunch, one Sunday in February, with a couple of brave friends: This led me to wonder about the origin of the word "tartare", which is used in "steak tartare" and "tartare sauce"....

Interpreting tip

April 5, 2007

So I was out of the office interpreting last week and really enjoyed the experience. It was hard work, with very long days, technical presentations, rowdy participants, karaoke and long bus journeys. But I was on the local news (well,...