Tuesday, December 10

At first we spoke about our next and last meeting of the year next week.

H. suggested he could organise in spring time a walk though the village of Isle Saint-Georges on a tuesday afternoon, walking around and tasting wines, of course.
We managed to find, thanks to the dictionary, the idiomatic equivalent for our "par monts et par vaux" = to wander up hill and down dale. Here is a quotation from SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (II, ii) :

N. had brought her wonderful old dictionary of symbols in order to check the meaning of colours but we didn’t have time for it, so that we’ll read it next week. N. lent me her precious book, to get prepared...
The article about colours is based upon Henri Pfeiffer’s book, L’harmonie des couleurs, 1984.

We spoke about computers, laptops and keyboards, as well as file-names and dates.
A. explained how important it is to name our files this way if we want to sort them in a chronological order :

• to put the year-number first,
• then the month-number and
• the day-number at last
  

for example, today’s class will be named 20131210_englishclass.pdf.

Otherwise, here is a problem you may have to face :

In WE, when I click on the date modified button to sort chronologically, the files are sorted first by month and then by year. So, Dec 2007 is before Nov 2007, Oct 2007, etc. and then below all these comes Jan 2008. Is there another way to sort so I actually get the most recent files first ?

The difference between hyphen- and underscore_ on keyboards led to an odd information : when speaking on the phone, it seems that some people say "under 6" for hyphen (trait d’union) and "under 8" for underscore (souligner). What a cyber-intrusion in our lives !!!

Le tiret bas, aussi appelé sous-tiret, souligné ou blanc souligné, caractère de soulignement, underscore ou même, plus officieusement, tiret du 8, du fait de son positionnement sur la même touche que le chiffre « 8 » sur les claviers de type PC en AZERTY, est un signe typographique représenté comme ceci : « _ ». Il ne remplace pas le trait d’union ( - ) ni les tirets ( — et – ).

We had fun learning how to translate the French word "touche" :

• a key (keyboard)
• to have something going on with somebody (faire une touche)
• to score (fam.)
• to go on fishing
• to stay on the bench (wallflower...) (rester sur la touche)

We tried to remember names of English poets we heard about, when at school. Here are those who came out :

• Worsdworth and his daffodils,
• Byron for Paradise Lost
• Keats through a movie, Bright Star
• Yeats
• Miss Marple’s poet...

We spent the rest of our hour trying to answer Marlene’s quizz about ancestors.
We really enjoyed speaking about what we used to read when we were seven years old, our toys and games.
We could have called it YOUTH-MEMORIES. We decided to fill her questionary for next time. Thanks a lot M-C. for sharing.

We tried to find the difference between pail and bucket and spoke about etymology. Some of us were lucky enough to learn Latin. N. said that, from her point of view, learning German replaces it perfectly (sentences and so on).

For A. nursery rhymes are very useful to learn English. Here is one :

The final debate was about correcting mistakes. We are often so quick and keen to point mistakes that it prevents our neighbours from talking freely.