In one of my many small attempts to augment my understanding of the French language, I’ve been picking up the free newspapers around town and reading them as I ride the Métro. This works well since the papers aim for about a fifth grader’s reading level, and that’s probably about where I sit on the totem pole as far as my French goes.
Every once in a while, I find something fairly interesting, and really understand it. I once read and re-read a tiny paragraph about a new kind of alarm clock that is a puzzle, and in order to turn off its rousing wail, one must put the puzzle back together again. Reading this amazed me twice – First amazing thing: I understood exactly what it meant and somehow I was sure that I got it! (This can sometimes be a dangerous assumption. It can be worse to misunderstand something and think you have understood, than to know you are completely lost.) Second amazing thing: What an annoying alarm clock! It will never sell! The only constructive thing I might want to do upon waking is make myself a cup of coffee.
This morning I read, in an article that partially lost me with a few of those exotic fifth-grader verbs, a particularly lovely phrase. “…les libéraux tentant de tuer dans l’oeuf une autre motion de censure des conservateurs, la disant contraire au règlement.” Read it again, yes, “tuer dans l’oeuf”, kill in the egg. How marvellously graphic! It seems much more dramatic than its English equivalent, which I imagine to be “nip it in the bud”. No nipping here. We are killing unborn chickens and other things that come from eggs.
Clearly, what I took up as an idle activity while on public transport could be a idiomatic gold mine as well as basic French practice. It also seems to be an activity that leads to a web of mental relationships built between all the tiny fragments of things that remain once I’ve thrown the paper away, since I found myself wondering later why the silly alarm clock idea was not killed in the egg.