Month: February 2019

Put on your tuque

By Simon

Olympics tuque.

One of the songs I heard last night at a gig featuring Gordie Tentrees and Jaxon Haldane included the line “put on your tuque”.

This puzzled me as I didn’t know what a tuque was. From the context it seems to be some kind of clothing, and I guessed it might be a hat, but wasn’t sure, so thought I’d find out.

According to the Free Dictionary, tuque is a Canadian French word for “a close-fitting knitted or crocheted cap having no brim or a brim that is folded up to create an extra layer of fabric for warmth. Also called toque.”

It comes from the French toque, which is “any of several styles of small, close-fitting hats having no brim or a very short brim”. Which comes from the Spanish toca (cornet, wimple, headress, toque, bonnet), from the Iberian Vulgar Latin *tauca, and is probably of pre-Roman Iberian origin.

What do you call this kind of hat?

You can see and hear Gordie Tentrees and Jaxon Haldane here:

Selective Understanding

By Simon

Do you ever find yourself listening a something in a language you thought you knew well, and having difficultly understanding it?

This happens to me, even with languages I speak fluently, such as Welsh and Irish, especially when people are talking about an unfamiliar subject, or using an unfamiliar vocabulary.

Yesterday, for example, I watched some videos on YouTube in Russian and Swedish. I don’t speak either language fluently, but I can usually get a least some idea what people are talking about in them. With these videos though, I found it difficult to understand very much at all, as they were talking about people and things I know little or nothing about.

This is the Russian video – something about US visas, I think:

This is the Swedish video – something about politicians, I think:

I can usually understand just about everything on Radio Cymru (a Welsh language radio station), but sometimes I find it difficult to follow what people are saying, especially if they’re using very colloquial or very formal language. So there’s always more to learn.