you are the other half of my orange

In French class one of my classmates asked if a few similar-looking words had any historical relation. (accueillir=to welcome, and cuillère=spoon). So then my prof was looking up the etymology of both words, and it turns out that they are not related. (but the word for spoon comes from Greeks eating escargot, intéressant, non?) . And that just reminded me of how cool our world is since the events of the tower of babel.

I mean, isn’t it so interesting that in some languages of tropical climates (I forget specifically, but i’m not making this up) have only one word that can be translated to English as “cold, freezing, ice, snow, etc.” because those are all concepts that they never encounter in living in the warm sunshine?

And why is it that other languages have like, eight words that translate to “love” in English, and yet we English-speakers are content to use the same word to describe our feeling towards our favorite food as for the person who we spend the rest of our lives with?

And then there is the fun of literal translation. For instance, here are a few common expressions that I have encountered recently that made me smile:

“La media naranja” which is spanish for “soulmate” translates literally as “half of orange”.

« faire du lèche-vitrines » is how the french say « to go window shopping ». Literally, however, they “go window-licking”.

If you slept in and you wanted to tell this to your French-speaking friend you would say « j’ai fait la grasse matinee » which word-for-word in English is « i had a fat morning ».

And just to run with this idea of literal translations, and because I am so self-centered, I feel now is an appropriate time to vent about my stupid name.

By the time I came around, my parents had run out of st. bernards to name me after, (the first heidi and first kate, yes, were big slobbery canine friends of my young father) and they (my parents) were forced to venture out and find an appropriate name for their fourth baby girl, a beastly cripple with the lungs of a magpie. I’m not sure how, but they decided on cheri louise.

I have never been fond of my own name—cheri—which often gets mispronounced as ‘cherry’ (“oh, like the fruit,” they will say), is always misspelled, and oddly enough is accompanied by other peoples concerns about my nicknames (“cher?!! Like the singer? (how atrocious!)”).

Someone once said, if you want to feel better about your problem, find someone with a bigger problem—it’s not that hard. (Or something to that effect.)

And so I did.

I invested great amounts of time (if I may exaggerate a bit) feeling sorry for those kids who were named Precious, Lovely, etc, etc. The one defense ‘cheri’ had for itself was that it was not also an adjective that one might use to describe a rare stone, or perhaps their great-aunts tea set.

It HAD this defense, that is until I started studying French and learned that ‘cheri’ = ‘dearest’ en français (--the masculine form, no less). It was then that I realized that if I ever introduced myself to a french-speaking person, I would be one of those individuals whom I previously spent so much time pitying.

Furthermore, I learned that if someone were to write me a letter, they would begin:

Chere Cheri,

Or if someone was looking for me, they might say:

Je cherche pour cheri.

Or if you wanted to express how expensive I was (as people often do in their daily lives):

Cheri est cher.

That’s all I got. (have).