It seems that a knot butterfly, as the literal translation suggests, is for French people’s mind a very accurate description of a bow tie… Why not? La chauve-souris “Le noeud pap”, as the French would say, is a very fancy piece of clothing usually worn only on special occasions like weddings or balls. Weird, when we know that a potato is not a fruit but a root… And to confuse things even more, you’ll often hear French speakers call a “pomme de terre” a “patate” in colloquial French.
Literally, it translates as “apple from Earth” or “apple of the Earth”, it actually means a mere potato. This may be the most common and strange compound word of the French language. Don’t forget: it may not make sense to you but it does for French speaking people. Thankfully for you – or unfortunately, your call – the French language has some wonderful funny words of its own. Yes, it might not make sense to someone else, but to me it’s a perfect mnemonic way to learn vocabulary. Sure, it has nothing to do with a flying dragon like I imagined them (do you also picture the ones from Game of Thrones?) but it’s so unexpected that it’s actually pretty easy to remember it. In German, the word for plane is also pretty funny: “das Flugzeug” literally translates, in my mind, as the “flight stuff”. Take the English word “dragonfly” for instance. In fact, those are the words that I find the most interesting and the most memorable. When learning a language, we often come across words that, translated into our own language, seem bizarre, stupid or funny. “Do you eat apples of the Earth?”, “You should wear a knot butterfly at the wedding”, “My grandma’s house has two beautiful ox’s eyes”, “I have an irrational fear of bald-mice.” are all perfectly understandable sentences for someone who speaks French. Translated into English, however, the wording sounds a little bit funny.
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