Egg on my face...

Boy do I feel dumb. In the past, I have always been able to rely on my 20/20 memory. This time it seems to have let me down. You might remember this post from a couple weeks ago. In it I showed two photos of me on two separate cruises 15 years apart wearing the exact same attire. I also showed my ignorance. I ended that cursed post with a piece on Ebonics.

To help explain why I feel like an idiot, I'm going to reprint a portion of the post here:

Several years ago I read a paragraph that was beautiful in its composition as well as in its content. The writer showed a mastery not only of his subject matter, but also of the English language. Every word was perfectly selected and used for maximum force. It was an amazing thing to behold. The last sentence of the paragraph? C'est la vie...

I immediately put my big brain to work deciphering this oddity. I read and re-read this wonderful paragraph looking for context clues as to what this French phrase might mean. I finally came to the conclusion that it meant "The more things change" with the three periods (...) leaving the reader to fill in "the more they stay the same". Such a phrase, used in this manner, would have been the perfect ending to the perfect paragraph.

So for the past 4 or 5 years I've been roaming the Earth thinking I had a French phrase in my arsenal and probably even fired it off a few times at some unsuspecting listener. Imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when I learned that "C'est la vie" actually means "Such is life". In hindsight, I should have known better than to try to translate a foreign phrase using context alone. More importantly, I certainly should have verified this little piece of knowledge before I tried it out in conversation. Oh well, C'est la vie...

Now I'll attempt explain the idiocy I engaged in.

The phrase that I read those many years ago was not "C'est la vie" but "plus ça change". "Plus ça change" does mean "the more things change". So when I originally read the paragraph and thought that this French oddity must mean "the more things change", I was correct. Of course it wouldn't take a genius to decipher that, it's practically screaming it out.

Over the years, I "misremembered" the phrase and somehow substituted "C'est la vie" in my mind. And rather than go back and look up the paragraph to ensure that my blog post was accurate, I assumed that memory was still perfect. Oh well.

After reading and re-reading the portion on Ebonics, I was so proud of my work that I decided to e-mail a link to my Linguist Hero, John McWhorter. As I mentioned last week, John has recorded many courses that are available through The Learning Company. I loaded "The History of Human Language" on my IPod and have listened to it many many times. I was hopeful that he would appreciate the effort that I put into learning and regurgitating what he taught. In addition, somewhere in that post, I included the phrase "eaten the eggs of endangered fish". John used this phrase in the course I listened to, I like it, and included it in my post to pay homage to him. Of course, before he could've arrived at the section on Ebonics, he would've been forced to plow through all of that "C'est la vie" crap at the beginning of the post.

I had no idea if he would take the time to read it, and I certainly didn't expect to get a reply from him. However, he was kind enough to drop me a note confirming that I had a firm grasp on at least one of the concepts he taught in the course.

In typical Adam Thomas fashion, I immediately began gloating to my friends and family. Perhaps the nations foremost linguist complimented me. Until today, I continued to be proud of that post.

Today however, I read his latest article at The New Republic (here). For those too lazy to click the link and read the whole article, I'll reproduce a (very) small portion of it here:

The upshot of this gaslight-era ethnic lexicography is, quite simply, plus ça change.

Do you see what he did there?

He used the correct phrase for "the more things change" to end a paragraph.

This sentence exploded in my gut like a depth charge! I immediately realized that my "C'est la vie" post was complete and utter garbage. My memory failed me, I was too lazy to go back and check my facts, and I did not read the phrase "C'est la vie" like I said I did. I certainly read it somewhere, and then just as certainly, got confused. Not only that, but I had emailed it to the one person who would most assuredly recognize it for what it was.

Oh how I wish I'd gone back and looked up that paragraph before I went to press!

I can only assume that John was laughing a bit as he published today's work. "That fool down in Alabama confuses the only two French phrases he knows. I'll show him how to end a paragraph..."

I'm tempted to write a blog post about The Proto-Indo-European language to make amends. Luckily for you, dear reader, I've learned my lesson.