Vocabulary is curious and fascinating: local usage, specialist words, and the "false friends" of words which came from the same ancestors but haven't been on speaking terms since that row between many-great-grandfather and his brother. I can read Voltaire, Dumas, and Mallarmé pretty well; the reading list at university included many mid-twentieth-century works and a dictionary of Argot. Two days spent in a French school on an exchange visit left me with some grasp of the difference between poetry and verse and an ineradicable ear-worm of the first four lines of La Cigale.
Colloquial speech is sometimes easy, and sometimes not so easy (I remember the English wine-dealer and old-house-owner who said his conversational French wasn't very good but he spoke excellent Building). For example, trying to establish what animal was hit by Y's car had me lost after she and C decided it wasn't cerf, sanglier, or lapin - I didn't recognise the names of any of the others.
I've been meaning to check some musical terms, particularly the term for "sheet music" aka "the dots". Note that English doesn't have a word for it: the fact that we commonly refer to it as "music" can be very confusing when trying to define "Music", a hard enough task anyway. It turns out that the French use one word rather than a phrase, and I now know what it is.
At Monday's rehearsal, the director commented that I was ranging my partitions.
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