pseydtonne | "Twinkle, Twinkle... blah, blah, blah."

It's been nearly a month since I posted anything. I've been in a weird sort. The short version: I haven't had any chocolate in a few days and my body is happier for it. I don't get it yet, but at least I can guess some of my problems and addictions again.

Rather than tell you the whole story of "Why I Didn't Write", which is kinda boring, I'll just offer what I wrote to my mom in a letter I sent today. She was mentioning using fairy tales to brush up on her German.

I have a book of fairy tales from Quebec that I work through sometimes. They can actually be harder for me than the books on the history and development of the French language that I usually read in French because they require concrete and un-English words. A word that looks like a Latin word in a linguistic context is probably the word one thinks it is; the word "if", standing by itself in a children's tale, means nothing.

I can swirl around a couple paragraphs and notice a character walking around "un if", and I can eventually conclude "this must be some kind of tree." I can stay brave by looking in my French-only dictionary, my big computerized one. I then learn that it's a tree from Ireland and that it's sacred among the Celts, that the word itself comes from ancient Gaulish spoken by the people Julius Caesar conquered in 52 BC. Okay, groovy. I was right about the tree -- but is that a fir? Maybe it's deciduous. Oh wait, it does say it's a conifer and that it bears a red fruit. Great, red-fruited tree -- is it an apple tree? Are they berries?

Even though I now know a lot about this one word and that process has been enjoyable, I still have to look up the word in a French-English dictionary. An "if" is a yew tree. Oh great, the answer! But I still have no mental image of a yew tree. I've never called anything a yew tree in my life. It sounds like a name from China, not Ireland.

Now I have to look for a picture of a yew tree in Google Images. I finally see the small, raspberry-like berries. I also see the girth of the older versions of the trees -- they don't grow up so much as they grow out. They become their own bouncers. They look gnarled and knotted, especially with their propensity for exposed roots. I can see the religious angle, the Yggdrasil vibe. They remind me of the live oaks I saw in Wimberly, Texas, but they are much stouter.

I find all sorts of details about the soil around yew trees yielding fascinating drugs, let alone their sap or cuttings. This is a tree of life -- and probably also an easy tree for a short climb. Now I understand why the Grand Robert (the French version of the OED) mentioned this tree with cemeteries. The GR had also mentioned this was a beloved tree for cabinet-making (ébénisterie, from the word "ebony") and that the word for finish woodworking is "menuiserie". That word looks like it comes from outer space but it's just related to "miniscule".

I go through all of this to learn a word that was a breeze-by word for a four-year-old drifting off to sleep in Trois-Rivières. "Oh yeah, the trees in the graveyard. G'night."

I love the process, but it means I have to save these simple texts for when I'm at home and near by references. When I'm reading French on the subway, I stick to texts with lots of Greco-Roman words because I can parse those.