French folk etymology: bleu-jaune

Mark Mandel thnidu at GMAIL.COM
Sun Mar 1 01:22:05 UTC 2009


On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 6:37 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> Waitaminute. Â I thought Mark was saying there was
> no connection between the names of the Swedish
> films and "bleu-jaune" (topic of earlier message
> about its folk-etymology in French), not that
> there's no connection between the names of the
> two films with each other, which of course there
> is.
> ...
> At 4:47 PM -0500 2/28/09, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>I don't understand your reply, Mark. You say that, according to
>>Wikipedia, there's no connection, then you provide a cite from
>>Wikipedia that shows that there *is* a connection.

Yes, I was answering the question I thought Ron was asking. See the
subject line of this thread and the post Ron was replying to (Larry's
reaction to my thread-starter), which he quotes in full. In that
context, Ron's question

>In the 1960s a famous pair of films scandalized America: I AM CURIOUS
>(YELLOW) Â  and I AM CURIOUS (BLUE). Any connection?

has to be taken not as "any connection between these two films?", but
as "any connection between the pairing of YELLOW and BLUE in these
titles (which are assumed/known to be connected) and the pairing of
'bleu' and 'jaune' in the French eggcorn?".

m a m

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list