trashy ravens

It's weird. the words in French and German for objects keep popping into my head at random. Maybe I should label everything, like we did in high school language classes. When I was in college, Sara L. and I labelled everything in our dorm room, too. We had mini-wars over what would get labelled. I finally got to label the radio in German because das Rundfunk sounds way cooler than la radio, or whatever it is in Spanish.

Ah, it brings back memories of high school when we got to spend an entire class period running around the school sticking paper labels to as many objects as we could before the Spanish Club got to them. The French team won-- I think I labelled every garbage can with la corbeille or la poubelle, the former being still one of my favorite words. I think I liked la corbeille so much because I was a little budding goth, and it's similar to the word le corneille ("crow"), which of course was (and still is I guess) my favorite bird. I thought they were connected, and that was cool, since crows are scavengers, and eat what others might call trash. the word had really cool dramatic connotations... of course looking it up in my dictionary, I see that corneille is from the Latin cornix meaning "crow," and corbeille is from corbis meaning "wicker basket." Oh well. It was cool while it lasted.

I remember I used to get those words confused all the time, just because they sounded the same, and thus would right essays that ended up saying things like "the trash can was sitting on a branch..." I discussed this with some French person once, who though it was hilarious to get "trash can" and "crow" confused, but then admitted that in English, she sometimes confused "cabbage" with "garbage" and "kitchen" with "chicken." See? It's not just me!

Other things I get confused:
Küche and Kuchen (kitchen and cake)
Kirche and Kirsch (church and cherry)
Flüss, Schluss and Schlüssel (river, the end, key)
Schmatz and Schmerz (kiss and pain)

I can't think of any other French things I get confused right now, but I'm sure there are many.