Gazing at the lavender in my garden (slowly refinding growth) I decided I’ll go back to Provence this summer, to the wonderful monastery I was at last July, to the delicious food and wine and sun and red-brown earth and laughing people. I dug out my notes and started practicing le conditionnel: “Si j’etais un homme / Je t’offrirais de beaux bijoux / Une fleur pour ton appartement / Des parfums ‡ vous rendre fous / Et juste ‡ cÙtÈ de Milan / dans une villa qu’on appelle Bergame / Je te ferais construire une ville. / Je suis femme et quand / On est femme on n’achËte pas ces choses-l‡.” A girlfriend of mine once sent roses to her boyfriend when he was at work. He was mortified, utterly embarrassed. She cried as she told me.
Previous Post
need Next Post
guardian article 4 thoughts on “le conditionnel”
Leave A Comment Cancel reply
Recommended Posts
Whenever I give talks about ChatGPT and LLMs, whether to ninth graders, businesses or journalists, I meet people who are hungry for information, who really want to understand this new technology. I’ve interpreted this as interest and a need to understand – […]
Having your own words processed and restated can help you improve your thinking and your writing. That’s one reason why talking with someone about your ideas can help you clarify your thoughts. ChatGPT is certainly no replacement for a knowledgable friend or colleague, […]
Like the rest of the internet, I’ve been playing with ChatGPT, the new AI chatbot released by OpenAI, and I’ve been fascinated by how much it does well and how it still gets a lot wrong. ChatGPT is a foundation model, that […]
A few weeks ago Meta released Galactica, a language model that generates scientific papers based on a prompt you type in. They put it online and invited people to try it out, but had to remove it after just three days after […]
This spring when I was learning R, I came across a paper by Anders Kristian Munk, Asger Gehrt Olesen and Mathieu Jacomy about using machine learning in anthropology – not to classify big data, as machine learning is often used, but to […]
I’m co-organising a preconfernece workshop for AoIR2022 in Dublin today with Annette Markham and MaryElizabeth Luka today, and I’m going to show a few of the ways I’ve engaged with new digital platforms and genres over the years. This is a key […]
JLR
Your quote is in fact the lyrics of a french hit ballad song called “Si j’etais un homme” sang by Diane Tell (back in the early eighties). She is from Quebec (Canada).
Jill
Mm, I know the song (French lessons traditionally consist of old songs, I quite like that) but I didn’t realise she was Canadian. She has a pretty grooved up Flashy website, where you can listen to excerpts of lots of her songs.
JLR
Diane is still a singer-songwriter-guitarist. Go to her official website:
http://www.dianetell.com/
Jill
Yeah, I went, that’s where the link in my comment was to 🙂