word of the day: Qui dort, dine

If you read literature you run across French. Occasionally you’ll get snippets of another non-English language in your literature written in English, but mostly it’s French. Typically, it's just dropped in untranslated. Any cultured person is supposed to know French. I didn’t do French in school. I did Spanish in high school. In college I did Portuguese, also American Sign Language. French is not completely opaque to me. English did incorporate French words when French was the official language of the English court so all English speakers have some familiarity with French words — all those -tion words, for example. But most French? Yeah. Most French I don’t get. And I certainly didn’t when I was a kid. You couldn’t just turn to a dictionary and look it up. Not that I did that much anyway. I was not one to spend a lot of time with the dictionary. Taking a breath from a story to look up a word seriously interferes with the flow. That is, if there’s even a dictionary handy. 

I occasionally read books on my iPad these days. And you can look a word up by just pressing on it. That would have been cool to have as a kid. But I did fine back then figuring out meanings from context. Just looking up a word in the dictionary is not a way to make it useful. You have to get used to it. You have to read things where that word appears again and again. That was something I figured out from looking up words in the dictionary. There are still words that I run onto that I know I’ve seen before, but which remain beyond reach. I turn to the dictionary and nod. “Yup, I’ve read this definition before.” And it still doesn’t stick. “Heuristic” is one of those. Something to do with — I forget. 

When I was reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer French became an obstacle — because there is a whole lot of it. I was otherwise enjoying the novel. And I didn’t want to have to stop every page or so to resort to Google translate. So I put in placemarks so I could revisit the mysterious French. I put in so many placemarks I decided to type up all the French. I put the list up as a blog post. The French in Tropic of Cancer is the most visited Dare I Read post. 

word of the day: Qui dort, dine

context: 

Miss Bianca, the leader of the Mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society, tells a prisoner he must keep watch all night. The prisoner groans, ‘I can’t.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Miss Bianca bracingly. ‘It is because … you are undernourished. “Qui dort, dine,” as they say in France! You must make one more effort.’

definition (wiktionary): Literally "[one] who sleeps, dines”. Proverb: sleep allows one to go without food

another definition (LingQ) as proverb: You snooze, you lose

 

“You snooze, you lose” sounds more like the meaning Miss Bianca wants than the one about being able to assuage hunger with sleep. The prisoner is malnourished. Miss Bianca is not encouraging him to skip meals. Rather, she wants him to keep watch — not miss out on information. 

I don’t think there was any dictionary I had access to as a kid that would have helped me out here. 

source:

The Turret

by Margery Sharp

illustrations by Garth Williams

1963. Little, Brown, & Co., Boston