This blog has been an ambition of mine for a while now. I love words and their use and abuse. I am generally fascinated by how the English language hangs together – and how it does so in spite or by grace of the fact that it has absorbed many thousands of words from other languages.
Armed with a copy of WordPress and no coding skills at all, I strung this together to the best of my limited ability. If you have a blog and would like to make suggestions as to how I can improve it, I would welcome your comments.
So, here for you, the reader I give you “Word du Jour”, an unstructured attempt at documenting some of my favourites and some I stumble across. I hope you enjoy it.
Word du Jour? Well, almost…
It’s actually a word a day during the week. I don’t blog at weekends as I am busy sleeping and eating and other things I tend to miss out on during the week. Anyway, the title would have to be something like “Word des jours lundi au vendredi inclus”, which I’m sure you’ll agree is not a very snappy title.
What does ‘du jour” mean?
I noticed I get a lot of traffic from search engines asking for the literal translation of du jour. Well, I can tell you that it means “of the day”, so “Word of the Day”. A little more background: In French, things are masculine or feminine (I have no idea why, sorry). So, de la table would mean “of the table” – “la” is used because it signifies that the table is feminine. If a thing or object is masculine, “le” would be used, but as “de le” sounds a bit rubbish, the French use “du”. So there you have it. For reference:
la = “the” (feminine)
le = “the” (masculine)
les = “the” (plural – masculine or feminine)
de la = “of the” (feminine)
du = “of the” (masculine)
des = “of the (plural – masculine or feminine)
I hope this has been of some help.
Tom
