Thursday, December 9, 2010

I Was Possessed!

I promise!
It couldn't be anything else.
Normally, I'm a pretty sane guy. I mean I don't usually do crazy stuff and I try to keep a low profile.
Not that my profile has anything to do with this.
More on my profile later.
So anyways, if you've been following along at home, you, the reader, know that I've been making a feeble attempt to expand my mind by reading books in French.
The language I mean.
Difficult just isn't enough word to describe it.
Actually, it's sort of like riding a bike only instead of making my massive thighs hurt, reading French makes my brain hurt and I just can't seem to stop.
I guess you could call it mental bike riding.
Or something.
Well, just to show you all how hard core I am, I just got this:



I swear I thought it had something to do with Voltaire, Baudelaire, or maybe even Robespierre and not this La Rochefoucald, a dude I never even heard of!
Well, I never heard of him until this book came today.
Seems this guy was some kind of olden day gigolo who had like three mistresses and when he wasn't fighting a war in his spare time wrote about morality and stuff.
Moral reflections or maxims, the book calls them.
Here's a sample, in anglaise:

Youth is a continual drunkenness: it is the delirium of reason.

What the hell is that supposed to mean?
Seriously.
Maybe I'm daft or something, but I can't seem to figure that one out.
Okay, actually, the dude does make some sense:

Hardly any man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.

That's pretty deep.
In a deep sort of way.

It is a great folly to want to be wise on your own.

I hear ya on that one!
Now the bad thing in all this, check this out, read the three lines again.
Did you read it?
Actually know anyone that talks like that?
Didn't think so.
Reading these archaic and Yoda like sayings are really gonna help me with my conversational French!



If Yoda were French, I mean.
Which brings me to something interesting.
Yoda is French!
Think about it!
The way he talks all bass ackwards and all, he's got to be from like Paris or Nice or something:

Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you.

See what I mean!

Named must be your fear before banish it you can.

Dagoba smagoba! that little dude is from like Normandy or Bretagne!
Now I don't know what possessed me to order that book, maybe it was the Force or something, but I'm glad I did.
Secrets of the universe did it reveal.

2 comments:

Steve A said...

Did you know that Yoda's first name is Jean-Luc? No relationship it the Star Trek Jean-Luc.

limom said...

Well now.
I rest my case.