Bonjour everyone,
I really enjoy reading A Word A Day newsletter. It is very good to help me learn new English words. I wonder if anyone ever heard about the same kind of newsletter in other languages, such as in French?
Thanks for your help !
Patrice-Guy Martin
Montréal, Québec
Canada

Don't know how I missed this, Patrice-Guy!
I wish you a belated but grand welcome, especially because
French is the only foreign language I took in school.

Can't help with your query at the moment, but I have a
request of you, if you don't mind: could you please clear
up the merde/merdre question? One R or two?
Thanks!

More than pleased to help you Jackie !
The M word is spelled with only one R. "Merde".
Same kind of usage than in English, by the way. "Oh, shit!" when something goes wrong would be "Ah, merde!" in french. A "shitty day" would be "une journée merdique".
But also, when you want to wish good luck to someone and you say "brake a leg!" in English, well, you can say "merde!" in french.
Thanks for your answer and if you hear of some equivalent of AWAD in french, let me know !
Patrice-Guy

Perhaps you can help us out with "miss" too. Do women become Madame after a certain age even if they are not married?

Without in any way wanting to knock Patrice-Guy (soyez le bienvenu, Patrice-Guy!) did any of you notice that he shows his address as Montreal, Quebec? (sorry about the accents, but I can't be bothered to look up the ASCII characters at the moment and my MS Word shortcut doesn't work in this window...)

Perhaps we should start off by asking whether he's been to France and how different he finds French French and Canadian French?

When we move on to the usage of Madame, the two countries could be very different. The US is the only place I've been where a shop assistant might address me as Ma'am. In the UK I think we reserve that form of address for the Queen...

> Can't help with your query at the moment, but I have a
request of you, if you don't mind: could you please clear
up the merde/merdre question? One R or two?

If this in reference to my post elsewhere then you obviously missed the fact that I explained soon after that the mis-spelling was down to a typo caused by my rapid typing. There is no 'merde/merdre' question per se. I just did not spell check it before posting it on the board. I hope we can leave it at that because I am getting sick of people contacting me to tell me I mis-spelled it. I know I did, I was unaware of this until after I posted it so this post should clear it all up. Enough already!

'Brick, Sweetie, I was asking for myself. Public schools
tend not to teach their students "dirty words" no matter
what the foreign language is. I'd only heard it, QT, never seen it spelled out.