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I fence. Classical fencing, of course, because Olympic fencing in a vile, horrible thing. But I won't get into that, because that isn't the point of this.
So, anyway, because I fence, when I was going into seventh grade, I picked French as my foreign language, because I figured that it would come in handy for fencing. Well, it mostly hasn't, and I sort of wish I'd taken Spanish. But there was a situation recently where I got to use it.
In fencing, we count our sit ups, push ups, etc., and usually in English. Well, Simon decided last week that he wanted to count everything in french, so he says,
"Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq..."
And so on. He was correct until he got to twenty-one, which he said as "Vight-un", instead of "Vight et un". He continued counting, and he did this for thirty-one, forty-one, and fifty-one. When he stopped, I pointed this out to him, and he, Linda, and myself got into a conversation about how the French's way of counting is so different from ours.
Such as how it goes,
...sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, sixty-ten, sixty-eleven, sixty-twelve....
And eighty? eighty is "quatre-vight", or "four-twenty".
This lead to a discussion of Abraham Lincoln("four score and twenty years ago" wink .
Which lead to how they have a picture of Lincoln on a wheel chair going down a hill...
O.o
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