Muguet des Bois

[callmemadam]

For people of a certain age, the first French words they ever saw were probably ‘Cette sauce de haute qualité…’ read off the side of a bottle of HP sauce. Muguet des Bois stuck in my head from a very young age. I expect it was from Yardley soap; what a pity you hardly ever see it now. Lily of the Valley really does have the most exquisite scent and as it opens in the garden I get a quite Proustian feeling that it’s May already.



Sauce bottles, bars of soap, Soir de Paris perfume by Bourjois, French characters in books forever saying Sacrebleu!; it's a muddle but a start. Coming across French and German expressions via the Chalet School books would lead to some gross errors:-)
How did you meet your first foreign words?

Comments

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

A jigsaw puzzle entitled La Chatte Et Ses Chatons!

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'd forgotten that!

[lizarfau.livejournal.com]

French: Tiens! Courtesy of the Mamzelles of Enid Blyton books.
German: Verboten! Courtesy of war movies.
Then lots of French and German words in the Chalet School.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Tiens! That's a good one. I'm fond of Mamzelle.

[cornflowerbooks.livejournal.com]

I pronounced it 'teens', of course, when I read the books.
Off to check my Lily of the Valley (which may have been smothered by something big and vigorous....)

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Ha ha!
It would be a tough plant that could kill Lily of the Valley. Love it, though.

[lurpak.livejournal.com]

probably from old pop songs - Michelle, Voulez Vous and Lady Marmalade (voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir) spring to mind!

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Yes! and Denis,Denis, what a great pop song. I like the franglais of 'Je suis un rock star, j'habite the south de France'.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Hee! You missed out 'Kamerad!'

[mimmimmim.livejournal.com]

My dad was in the Air Force and we were based in Holland and Germany from the time I was about a year old to about four, so I suppose I encountered it then.

Otherwise, a Richard Scarry book where everything was labelled in English, French and German, and one of those clicky 3-D viewer things with Dutch and German discs (we brought them back when we came back to the UK).

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

Richard Scarry's books are *good*.

Do you mean a Viewmaster? I didn't think they still existed!

[ramblingfancy.livejournal.com]

I remember my Auntie playing Edith Piaf on the record player and learning Alouette and Sur le pont at a tender age!

Lovely lily of the valley!

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

What a sophisticated auntie!

[dorianegray.livejournal.com]

My first foreign words were "deux baguettes et une zig-zag, s'il vous plait".

When I was about 9 we went on holiday to France and stayed in a gite in Brittany; my parents taught my younger brother and me this phrase so that we could go to the boulangerie of a morning and get the day's bread. We were so proud of being able to buy the bread all by ourselves.

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

You learnt something useful! I hope they were kind to you in the baker's and not the fierce types.

[dorianegray.livejournal.com]

Oh, they were lovely. This was down-the-country middle-of-nowhere France, where the locals are thrilled when you make an effort and trot out your three words of French left over from the Leaving Cert 20 years ago - they were even more thrilled when the little foreign children were making the effort. (And taught us other words by the point-to-item-and-speak-its-name method.)

[(Anonymous)]

I remember when I was at primary school, we didn't have a library just a bookshelf - but there was a book I adored and read again and again about a child who had been sick and went to stay with a family in France. This host family had a naughty little sister they called la petite diable, which in my 9yo mind was pronounced something like la petite dye-a-bull. And they drank lots of citrons pressés, which obsessed me for years with a longing to taste one. Can't for the life of me remember the name of that book but how glamorous it all seemed in the 1960s when it evoked the smell/taste of Abroad. Where, needless to say, I had never been!