Diacritiques

As you can see on the left, I have taken a leaf, no, a page out of rogblog and added links to “word of the day” services. The Robert link is much less slick than the others, though, and I will have to change the code every few days by hand. Is there really no French web site that provides a snippet of javascript people can link to if they are interested in words? I’m not specifically asking Les Dictionnaires Le Robert to do so; anyone at all would be quite all right. (Or are all French dictionary publishers so territorial about their copyrighted content that they resist this great way of opening the doors to knowledge?).

My choice of “démocratie” was inspired by this post (in French) by Laurent at Embruns. It links to a commented excerpt from a text by José Saramago in this month’s Le Monde Diplomatique’s paper edition. I am very fond of Saramago.

Be that as it may, what about a word of the week feature on this blog? I am tempted to publish regular installments of words or idioms I come across in French or English. The pleasant thing about blogging is that I’m entitled to be whimsical. Wotw — mdls in French — let’s give it a try.

So the first one is … cat vacuuming, also known as waxing the cat, a term from the world of science fiction writing. Deirdre provides the explanation.