Thanksgiving and Peanut Butter

Two small points of interest and a postscript:

1. I will, for the first time ever in my short but venerable life, be missing all Thanksgiving celebrations. Not only am I outside any country that celebrates the day of great feasting, but the two American students who are hosting [separate] Thanksgiving dinners are doing so on Saturday. I am leaving to visit Aunt Rhoda and Company on Friday afternoon, and ergo will be absent from the possible overindulgence that will occur in Angers on a small scale. Hence, I charge anyone with a conscience to pray that I run across some pumpkin pie within the next two days.

2. I have a French nickname. Last Thursday I was sitting in the building that passes for a student union, typing up the Paris blog and reading emails, when a fellow American student popped a squat beside me. Andrea was waiting for a classmate from a translation class to meet her so they could do their homework together. When Stephanie sat down we introduced ourselves, but did not say much more than that. Eventually I pulled a bag of Peanut Butter M&Ms (courtesy of Jessy Elliott) out of my backpack and offered it to the two girls. Stephanie asked what was different about this particular brand of M&Ms, and when I tried to explain that "il ya a de beurre de cacahuètes dans les centres des M&Ms"—there's peanut butter in the middle of the M&Ms—she laughed uproariously at my pronunciation. To soften the blow to my speech ego, Stephanie patiently coached Andrea and myself on the pronunciation of cacahuète. It took me so long to finally say it right that Stephanie decided to call me Cacahuète for the rest of the night (she turned out to be a fairly hep cat), and when I saw her last night she yelled, "Ah, mon cacahuète!" when she saw me. Stephanie and Andrea did not emerged unscathed either, since Andrea could not pornounce the word for frog, grenouille (guess what her nickname is), and in retribution we poor browbeaten foreigners decided to call Stephanie by her favorite word in English—Coconut.

Postscript: When I was in French class this afternoon I repeatedly drifted into the land of daydreams and random thought, and a recurring thought was on the various names for my favorite carnival/fair food: "cotton candy", "spun sugar", and "candy floss". However, the more I thought about it (I was really bored), the stronger my conviction became that the name "candy floss" is a near-oxymoron. The purpose of floss and flossing is to prevent the development of cavities and other such oral afflictions while the effect of candy consumption is the appearance of cavities. Why on earth would anyone want to floss with candy? Isn't that basically putting cavities in your mouth, as in "Here, Mr. Cavity, why don't you just snuggle up between these two molars here?" Such nonsense.

Post-postscript: The correct pronunciation of cacahuète is harder than it looks on paper, and to an anglophone, would not seem at all phonetic. Ditto grenouille.