By the way I recently started using Tumblr in French and I’d like to be the first to say that it’s really weird and doesn’t really make sense. The words are all correct but the whole concept doesn’t really work in French.

Anyway the sort of cool French kids that’d use Tumblr would be the same kids who are too cool to speak French and probably speak English one hundred percent fluently; I don’t know a single French person who uses facebook in French, for example.

The apprehension of languages other than English is well and truly dead, it’s a fact. This is a sad fact as it renders my whole degree, everything I’ve worked for in life this far and my entire skill-set (which consists solely of: speaking French) totally useless. Oh.

#existentialism

The French love English and they love wearing clothes with English writing on, even if it it makes little or no sense. I suppose it works the other way, too, but walking around Paris you notice a hell of a lot of ridiculous T-shirt slogans.

Yesterday a man got on the metro wearing a brightly coloured T-shirt with the words ‘BOYZ IN THE HOOD’ written across it. The word ‘hood’, though, had been blocked out and scribbled across to read ‘food’. How cool. And instead of ‘boyz’ (already notable in its attempts to be cool) the word actually read ‘POYZ’. Uhh.. what?

‘POYZ IN THE FOOD’, read the man’s T-shirt. Any ideas on what that could mean would be greatly appreciated. (I tried of course to take a picture of the man to facilitate further analysis of this formidable piece of rhetoric, but if growing up under Tony Blair’s New Labour government taught me anything at all, it’s that the Data Protection Act 1998 is God).

Other incidences of funny English slogans include a large-framed, well-built black man with a skin-tight white T-shirt with one word written across it in big, black font: ‘GHETTO’.

I rest my case.