I love reading the translations of instructions. Doesn’t matter if they’re for the proper use of a lamp or how to construct a bookshelf. Whenever I come across and instruction manual or guide sheet that has both French and English on it, I always read the French and compare it to the English. I figure that this helps me in two ways: it reinforces/rebuilds what I learned about registers in my translation class four years ago, and it adds new and fascinating words to my reading vocabulary. For instance, I have this cross-stitch pattern I just picked up at Wally World on clearance (fifty cents for a two-pack pattern with floss, fabric and material is awesome), and I opened it up to see what format the instructions/diagram are in because I’m weird like that and enjoy mentally cataloguing types of patterns/guides like that. So I was reading through the directions on framing, and where it talks about matting and using matboard for framing the piece, I checked the French translation and it uses une marie-louise for matboard! Not having studied much art in French class other than so-and-so’s and various artistic movements, I haven’t really been exposed to art studio terms, so this was way cool! Une marie-louise! I wonder where that came from, why it’s a name that can be used for people, and if that’s even the normal term for it or if it has alternative meanings or uses. I wish I had my French-French dictionary here; I’d look it up and put a little star next to it. How neat!

I’m also fascinated by the Spanish word (despite my inability to speak Spanish, I can still read parts of it) for a picture mat: un paspartú. (It took me forever to go through the alt+### to find that–It’s not used in French so I don’t know it off the top of my head.) I wonder what the etymology of that word is. It makes me think of some words in French which would make its literal meaning fascinating, but I can’t say for sure. What I’m thinking would probably be a calque. Oh well, it’s neat nonetheless! I love learning new words. Une marie-louise. Neat. Now it’s time to get Buster up and get Jerry going. I’ll have to wait on actually cross-stitching this until later. A plus tard!