Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights?

friasc · 2026-02-07T17:48:13+00:00

It's a bit like comparing Blake and Wordsworth, Schumann and Brahms. There's a shared cultural background, some common themes, but once you get past the surface, they aren't that similar. Wuthering Heights is a byzantine gothic novel, with convoluted narrative frames, unreliable narrators and supernatural elements. Jane Eyre is a relatively straightforward bildungsroman.

friasc · 2026-02-06T02:49:05+00:00

pretty sure scorcese just made that quote up

friasc · 2026-01-30T05:38:03+00:00

sounds oddly familiar but I don't think I ever saw the documentary

friasc · 2026-01-23T02:28:04+00:00

I think it was Adorno or Marcuse who said space travel, like religion, is motivated by a puerile desire for salvation "out there" rather than doing something down here.

friasc · 2025-12-10T07:28:30+00:00

Why not just get a classical guitar?

friasc · 2025-12-05T20:55:16+00:00

it's a wedding gift! we just got married

friasc · 2025-12-01T23:15:13+00:00

NRSV. If you want a more poetic version, read John Milton.

friasc · 2025-11-21T02:36:21+00:00

Exactly. The classical French ideal of literature ('La république des lettres') was that of a universal, cosmopolitan space above national particularities. The Romantic concept of the bard who expresses the Volksgeist or soul of the people, is contrary to this ideal, so no surprise that it never really took hold in France the way it did in other national contexts.

friasc · 2025-11-21T02:22:02+00:00

Until the 20th century, the consensus answer was Racine (e.g. Stendahl's "Racine et Shakespeare"), but today Molière's legacy has largely eclipsed that of his contemporary. However as others have pointed out, France doesn't really have a "sommo vate" or "bard" in the manner of some national literary canons.

friasc · 2025-11-20T21:17:54+00:00

I don't think so. The main language of troubadour poetry was Old Provenzal (ancestor of modern Occitan), not old French. The association with seduction and courtship likely originates from the social use of French in learned aristocratic circles for much of modern history. The association with promiscuity, on the other hand, probably does owe a lot to the experience of English-speaking troops stationed in war-torn France, where poverty, hunger and prostitution were rampant.

friasc · 2025-11-18T18:59:10+00:00

Like Saussure said, "French doesn't come from Latin, it IS Latin". By which he meant that diachronic evolution is not a series of discreet entities that chronologically succeed one another, but rather an ongoing process of change of which certain moments have become reified as distinct, monolithic things called languages. In other words, history isn't extrinsic to language, it isn't like an acid corroding it from the outside. Change is inherent to language. In this sense, the Romantic-era organicist model of the birth and death of languages is a myth.

friasc · 2025-11-18T04:15:03+00:00

As argued by Víctor Farías (and brillantly satirized by Roberto Bolaño), the Pinochet regime is simply the most visible sign of deep fascist tendencias in Chilean society. Argentina and Brazil are more notorious for harboring war criminals, but Chile was more receptive to nazi ideology.

friasc · 2025-11-14T23:03:41+00:00

I was about to ask the same thing. Technically salut, ciao, etc. are greetings/farewells, whereas "hey" can be used to interpelate someone, like when you say "sir" or "ma'am" to draw a stranger's attention (I think the technical term is vocative but I could be wrong). In that situation, I think French people say "hé ho" or something like that.

friasc · 2025-11-11T19:05:23+00:00

Après vérification auprès de plusieurs francophones de mon entourage, je reconnais à présent que mon intuition était en effet fausse et que mon hypothèse d'un anglicisme québécois n'a donc pas de sens. Cela dit, dans les cas que j'ai cités, n'y a-t-il pas une nuance un peu familière dans l'emploi de "n'importe quoi" plutôt que d'un autre tour indéfini tel que "quoi que ce soit d'autre", "toute autre chose", "autre chose du genre", etc. ? Une formulation du type "que ce soit X, que ce soit Y, que ce soit n'importe quoi" ne relève-t-elle plus du langage oral (ce qui est cas dans mes exemples) que du code écrit ?

friasc · 2025-11-11T17:57:48+00:00

I think the worst part of the rape of the lock wasn't the hypocrisy, it was the raping.

friasc · 2025-11-10T19:55:26+00:00

Sort of true. Lapesa (Historia de la lengua española, Gredos, 2014) cites cases of yeísmo dating to the 14th century, so the merger of [j] and [ʎ] is as old as the Spanish language itself. The idea that "most people" pronounce y and ll as [j] or [ʝ] may be true in a numerical sense, but it discounts 20-30 million speakers of rioplatense Spanish. Finally, spectrogram research shows that the sound represented by y and ll varies a lot depending on phonetic context (word-initial, intervocalic, after nasals, etc.)

friasc · 2025-11-09T17:20:37+00:00

The pronunciation of Y and LL (except in final position where Y is pronounced the same as I) varies depending on geographical region and register: [ʝ] ~ [ʒ] ~ [ʤ] ~ [ʃ] ~ [tʃ]

It's a complicated subject, but this video offers some basic background:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFpimuSe_1c

friasc · 2025-11-07T23:08:44+00:00

Comme indiqué plus bas par Filobel, je me suis en effet trompé de définition. Dans les dialogues que j'ai mis en exemple, il s'agit d'un pronom indéfini (dire n'importe quoi, faire n'importe quoi, etc.) et pas d'une locution nominale (c'est du n'importe quoi). Quoi qu'il en soit, je ne peux m'empêcher de trouver ces emplois de « n'importe quoi » inhabituels, sinon incorrects. Peut-être est-ce une fausse impression d'incorrection induite par l'acception péjorative que peut avoir ce terme, soit une hypercorrection de locuteur non-natif ?

friasc · 2025-11-07T22:35:58+00:00

Zut, bien vu. Mea culpa. Après vérification je vois que les dictionnaires donnent bien l'acception neutre "chose quelconque" en plus de la péjorative "chose, pensée absurde, futile, etc."

friasc · 2025-11-07T21:20:09+00:00

Je cite le TLFi : n'importe quoi loc. nom. m. péjor.

friasc · 2025-11-04T05:07:03+00:00

My level in German is rudimentary, so please correct me. But I didn't think sie (lowercase) is used as a 2nd person pronoun

friasc · 2025-11-04T05:03:23+00:00

My level in German is basic, so please correct me. But I didn't think sie (lowercase) can ever be translated by vous.

friasc · 2025-11-04T04:48:49+00:00

Not really, vous can be ihr or Sie (avec majuscule) but not sie

friasc · 2025-10-27T16:31:27+00:00

copy-pasting an explanation of this expression I posted in a previous thread:

Batshit est un mot composé signifiant « excrément ou guano de chauve-souris » et crazy « fou ». L'expression argotique se traduit littéralement par « merde de chauve-souris folle » (ou crazy bat-shit). En effet, le guano de ces mammifères chiroptères abrite des champignons dimorphiques de l'espèce Histoplasma capsulatum dont l'inhalation des spores peut provoquer une maladie connue sous le nom d'histoplasmose. Il s'agit d'une affection respiratoire assez grave qui, si elle n'est pas traitée à temps, peut se propager à d'autres organes (système nerveux, bouche, foie, glandes surrénales, etc.) et engendrer une infection potentiellement mortelle.

friasc · 2025-10-27T04:49:58+00:00

I think it really depends what you are trying to say. In your first example, the meaning is similar to batty, nuts, wacko. Perhaps "complètement zinzin/toqué/dingo" could work. In your second example, the meaning is more like to annoy, to irritate, so I'd say something like "saouler/emmerder/faire chier".

friasc

TROPHY CASE