My subconscious must have been bothered that I never gave French Week proper closure, because last night I dreamed I was in a French class. It was the first day, and I was called on to read aloud from the textbook. As I stood up, I saw that the sentence I was supposed to read started with a Cyrillic character - the reversed "R" that makes an appearance in English text when the designer wants it to look "Russian". In fact it�s pronounced "ya", and in Russian it means "I" (that�s the first person singular pronoun, not the letter). I was flummoxed because I had no idea how I ought to say it in French. I thought about going with the Russian pronunciation, but as the awkwardness of my pause grew I realized it would be less humiliating to ask than to get the first word in the first sentence on my first day of class wrong. So I did, and one of my fellow students piped up with a condescending, "It�s �zhuh� as in, �Je parle francais.�"

I mumbled something about confusing it with a Cyrillic character, but stopped short of trying to work in a snide comment about Napoleon�s crushing defeat in Russia, because after all I was there to learn French.

Oddly related - I once had the privilege of being scolded for not speaking French by Roger Shattuck. I was one of the dramaturgs on an adaptation of a play by Alfred Jarry, and Shattuck was part of a pre-show panel. When I defended myself by telling him I�d chosen to study Russian instead, he replied, "Young lady, Russians choose to learn French."