L. Hochard: "prends garde De
toi doesn't mean anything in French..."
C.Kunin: Habanera, be damned! I
needs most humbly and publicly beg both your pardons ...
JM: The present subject's heading
is "de fencing lessons" and now we pass onto "garden fencing" in place of
"en garde fencing"! Thank you for your clarificatio, L.Hochard. Off-list, Andrea
offered additional information: The "s" is dropped when using imperative
in the 2nd person singular, and the verb garder takes "à" rather than "de" as a
preposition in the context you quote."
SK-B: ... am I mistook? The
singular imperative of Prendre is Prends, not Prend! 'Prends garde à toi'
is how I recall it. Or am I missing some idiomatic
quirk?
JM:Hochard and Andrea, not me, can
say if you're mistuck.
Andrea Pitzer [to Stan] You are
not mistook at all. I wrote Jansy off-list [...] in a fit of caffeine-free
delerium, and should now throw myself under the bus with Carolyn. Suffice it to
say that <<Prends>> is correct, not <<prend>> and that
the entirety of the line I zipped off to Jansy was addled. But as Laurence
noted, Jansy was correct on the preposition
involved.
Dmitri Nabokov: Carmen: the
[correct] French of the score, which I happen to have, is "prends garde à toi",
colloquially translatable as "watch your white ass."
JM: Let's proceed to
Shadian garden fences, then? Of the kind implied by Stan under "That's all,
Folks?"
Sergei Soloviev: The name "Ada" itself (and surely, there is a
distraction) has such hellish connotations in Russian (after all, Ad means Hell)
that it provoked many jokes. I remember from soviet times a joke about the
programming language "ADA" that was invented (the joke said) as a hellish
opposite to the Gorbatchev's wife Raya (diminutif of Raissa) - Rai in Russian
meaning "paradise".
JM: The paths to hell are lined with
primroses?
No more time to cut and paste former postings
but...Salzman/D.Z-- Bell/Zuckerman/C.Kunin-- Miller//Salesman/ Irena Ksiezopolska
- - Herzog//Bellow/Mike
Donohue ...
In the Nabokov spirit, mightn't they've been all
blended into one? ( the Herzog//Duke/Statue, often mentioned by VN, is
still puzzling for me in the present context ) I skipped and lost
J.F's remark taken up later by C.Kunin, a running-late rabbit.