Jackie (toasting with her papa)

une bête (beht) noun, feminine
1. an animal; a bugadjective: stupid, silly, foolish, idiotic

Hear the word bête pronounced: Download bete.wav

Also:
une bête à bon dieu = a ladybug
une bête féroce = a wild animal

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Expressions:
une pauvre petite bête = a poor little guy/thing
une bête noire = a pet peeve
chercher la petite bête = to nitpick

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French Proverb:
On prend les bêtes par les cornes et les hommes par les paroles.
We take beasts by their horns and men by their words.(Oxen are trapped by their horns and men by their words.)

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A Day in a French Life…

Jackie and I sit hunched over the table eating juicy pastèques* and swatting at, but not maiming, les mouches.*

My daughter wears a mismatched maillot de bain.* She has at least three press-on tattoos (the free gift inside 3 individually wrapped squares of bubble gum) on her arms and plastic rings on her forefingers. Her wrists tinkle from so many faux gold bracelets. She tucks a lock of green (pool-tinted) hair behind an ear as she eats.

“Where is the tapette à mouche?*” she says.
“Je ne tue pas les bêtes,” I remind her, shooing more flies away. It’s true, I don’t kill bugs.

It is sweltering outside and so we take refuge in our cool, if un-air-conditioned salon.* Half of the table is cluttered with Jackie’s drawings so I carefully push pens, pencils, stickers and erasers aside to make room for le déjeuner.*

Lunchtime conversation revolves around les bêtes:

“Listen, Jackie… What do you hear?”
“Les oiseaux,” she says, matter-of-factly.
“No. Those aren’t birds. Those are bêtes!”
“No. Fourmis* and cafards* don’t make that noise!”
“Those aren’t ants or roaches either!”

I pause for a moment and consider just what kind of noise ants and roaches make anyway. Perhaps if their sound were magnified to so many screeching decibels, it might just resemble the screaming cicada trills we are listening to now.

The racket outside is getting so loud that we have to shout over the pastèques:

“As-tu jamais vu une cigale,* Jackie?”
“What?”
“Have you ever seen a cicada?”
“Non. Je ne crois pas…”*

I’ve never really seen a live one either. But from the sound of things, I imagine a cigale must look something like a cross between a Brazilian maraca and a lethargic automatic lawn sprinkler.

Such thoughts are just amusing enough to help me forget this heat….

FRENCH VOCABULARY 

une pastèque (f) = a watermelon; une mouche (f) = a fly; un maillot de bain (m) = a bathing suit; une tapette à mouche (f)  = a fly swatter; le salon (m) = the living room; le déjeuner (m) = lunch; une fourmi (f) = an ant; un cafard (m) = a cockroach; une cigale (f) = a cicada; Je ne crois pas = I don’t believe so

More stories from these early years in France  in the books Words in a French Life