Four Score

“No Franglais allowed!”

Mr. Fox (Monsieur Renard) was a stickler for this rule in my 9th grade French class. We weren’t allowed to use both English and French to communicate, seeing as how this wasn’t the proper way to learn a foreign language.

The pros of that approach were that you really got the grammar down, but the cons were that you had a much harder time picking up vocabulary, and if you were stuck in the middle of a sentence, you sort of just sat there, stumbling and fumbling, wasting time.

Language is a funny thing. Learning it by rote memorization and by way of formalized education certainly didn’t leave me fluent in French, but it did give me an appreciation for different ways a language might turn out.

Let me give you an easy example of this: "quatre-vingt-dix-huit," which translates to ninety-eight in English but literally means "four twenties and eighteen."

Four twenties and eighteen?!? Are you kidding me?

If I were to spell out what 98 in English looks like, it would be n…