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[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 08/02/2002 5:57:41 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:

> I'm curious:  was your unsolicited message from France or French Canada?

The message came from an address @free.fr, which is France not Canada.

Checking the descriptions given of the girls, we find one listed as "Metise
asiatique" (I won't bother with accent marks) and another one as "Blonde, Ch
H Metisse ou black de preference".  The latter might be "cherchant homme
Metisse ou black"---"searching for a Mixed-race or black man."  I was not
aware that French uses "black" to mean "of African origin" and that feminine
"Metisse" modifying "homme" makes one wonder (for that matter, why do only
mixed-race people get capitalized?).  Here it appears that "meti" or
"metisse" is used to mean "black-white mixture", whereas in Canada "meti" or
"metisse" (or is it "metise"?) unmodified means "white-Indian mixture".
Hence Canada is unlikely.

There are linguistically interesting descriptions of other girls:
     Juste pour one night one girl delirante et top fun
     Cherche à être séduite par un homme musclé de la tête only !

Apparently each girl wrote her own sales pitch in whatever mixture of French
and English she preferred (that would also explain the unlikely word "black").

Or maybe not.  The opening line of the e-mail reads "Venez rencontrer l'ame
soeur" which I can only translate as a tone-deaf rendering of "come meet the
soul sister", so perhaps the author is a native English-speaker who only
thinks he knows French.  (If Canadian, then Anglophone not Francophone.)

I looked up "black" in my Larousse paperback French-English dictionary.  It
is not there, but the word "blackbouler" meaning "to blackball" is.

                - Jim Landau