French Humor

Beautiful girl: belle
Beautiful mushroom girl: portobelle

;)

Am I really the first person to come up with this joke? It seems so obvious. Google returns no hits for it though. My claim to fame? Somehow I doubt it. UPDATE: Well, Dire Sraits has a song called Portobello Belle, from their 1979 album "Communiqué," on the Mercury label. Wikipedia says it's about Portobello Road, in an upscale district near West London.

Dawn and I decided to study a foreign language together (Dawn's a trained linguist) so we chose to listen to French tapes in our car (we received them from a friend). Tonight on the way home I realized that the numbers higher than 70 follow a different pattern:

Notes:

The French numbers 0 through 19 are easy enough, right?

For 20 through 69, counting is almost just like in English: the tens word (vingt, trente, quarante, etc.) followed by the ones word (un, deux, trois). The only difference is that for 21, 31, etc., the word et is introduced between the tens word and one: vingt-et-un, trente-et-un, quarante-et-un, etc.

70 to 79 is trickier. In French, 70 is soixante-dix, literally "sixty-ten." 71 is soixante et onze (sixty and eleven), 72 is soixante-douze (sixty-twelve), and so on, up to 79.

80 is quatre-vingts, literally four-twenties (think "four-score"). 81 is quatre-vingt-un (four-twenty-one), 82 is quatre-vingt-deux (four-twenty-two), and so on, all the way up to ninety. 90 is quatre-vingt-dix (four-twenty-ten), 91 is quatre-vingt-onze (four-twenty-eleven), etc.

Fun.