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I studied Latin and French in high school. I did very well in the first year of each language, to the extent that I felt I might have a real aptitude for languages.
But around the middle of the second year things began to unravel. Translations became harder and harder as I failed to retain new vocabulary. I was as if I were a giant supersaturated sponge.
So I received my one 'C' in high school in Latin II. That should have taught me a lesson. But, in a triumph of hope over experience, I plunged into French III in my senior year, taught by a severe spinster named Louise Fricke.
The class was conducted mostly in French - a language that even by then I could not really read, nevertheless understand in spoken form. Can you conceive of taking a class of which you understand barely a word? It became my own private sort of hell. (It is interesting that I did not have this saturation problem in a course like Geometry, whose burgeoning axioms and theorems became a hell for many of my fellow students.)
This state of affairs gave rise to a number of incidents which I would have considered humorous were they not so embarrassing. One time Miss Fricke handed out some papers. Clueless, I asked the girl next to me what we were supposed to do. This received a stern reprimand by the teacher: it turns out we were being given a test - and I hadn't even known it! (My paper was very nearly taken out of a suspicion that I was cheating.)
Mlle Fricke frequently posed questions (in French) to individual students. Of course I dreaded the prospect of being called upon. In time I developed two kinds of responses to these unwelcome intrusions. One of these involved responding with 'Quoi?', as if I hadn't heard her. This would give me a second shot - usually equally hopeless, unfortunately. This technique must have frustrated my teacher, for one day she replied in exasperated French, 'Monsieur, you seem to be hard of hearing for a musician!' For once I was able to understand her - and give a witty rejoinder: 'Oui - comme Beethoven!'
My second method of evasion was equally feeble. It involved simply nodding my head and saying 'Oui, Mademoiselle!', as if I agreed with what she was saying. Of course this was risky: it was useless if she were asking me a question which needed a bona fide response. It could also prove embarrassing, as it did one time when she replied in English to my 'Quoi?' thusly! "Class, I just asked Monsieur May whether it is true that babies grow in cabbage patches and doctors gather them up, and he said, 'Yes'!" (In fact, I would call that highly embarrassing!) Apparently by then she had detected my little games of aversion!
Thank goodness the one French class I had to take in college was conducted in English!
Note: Below are a couple of entertaining stories connected to those high school language studies of mine.
1. Peter Hanson was an incredibly gifted member of my high school class (he was a National Merit Finalist and all the rest.) Unfortunately, Peter's interests were mainly of a scatological nature: you could not have a conversation with him that didn't wind up in the gutter. Heaven help any girl who had been intimate with him - he would spread accounts of what they had done with him far and wide. (I was good friends with one nice girl who had made such a mistake. He had inscribed in the yearbook: 'Peter wills a bottle of Glamoreen Rug Cleaner to a certain Junior girl'.)
One of Peter's inventions was the word 'cush', which he would deliver in a drawn-out and salacious manner. I had not been privy to the inception of this word, but even in my virginal purity at the time I could hear it as an onomatopoeia for some sort of unnamed obscene act.
Peter was in my French III class, and one day he must have said or done something off-color, for we were treated to (actually we were shocked by) the scene of Miss Fricke chasing Peter about the room, finally to confront him and then (lightly) slap him across the face. 'They can't fire me, I've already resigned, eh?' she intoned.
It was the day we had the substitute that Peter saw his chance. A few students had volunteered to give brief talks on some aspect of French culture. Peter had chosen to speak about a certain cathedral of which none of us had ever heard. With a straight face and the unctuous voice of the experienced pitchman, Peter spoke of the 'Cathédrale de Poulie Laineux'. While he droned on, Judy Mapletoft, a sweet wholesome girl next to me, looked up the words of the name in her French-English dictionary. 'Woolly Pulley?!' she exclaimed quizzically just as Peter said, 'It is noted for the height of its spire.'
I think Peter did manage to go to college - despite the fact that virtually no teacher would write him a recommendation.
2. Mark Strauss was in my 9th grade Latin I class. I recall him as a short wiry fellow possessed by a motor mouth.
Now as every Latin scholar knows, there are many cases and genders in that language. This leads to some interesting and involved declensions. The following1 is encountered early in a study of the language:
hic haec hoc
huius huius huius
hoc hac hoc
hunc hanc hoc
hoc hac hoc
hi hae haec
horum harum horum
his his his
hos has haec
his his his
Our Latin teacher held contests to see who could say these the quickest, and she would time us with a stopwatch. I recall that I and a few others were quite fast, but none of us could beat Mark: he always won.
Mark was a gifted, facile student. He was in my French III class, but I do not recall him ever stooping to the pathetic level of 'quoi?' and 'oui!'. He didn't need those things because he actually understood the language. He was going to Dartmouth (he coyly called it 'Dardbouche') and he was going to be successful.
My mother would get updates from Mark's mother in our home town. And so a few years later I heard that Mark had flunked out of Dartmouth and then moved to California. He dropped off our personal radar screen.
Until one evening when my mother was watching that perennial game show 'Beat the Clock' on TV. She noticed that one wiry little contestant would always leap from his seat first, run the fastest to ring the bell, and always get the correct answer. It was Mark Strauss, earning a decent living using the skills he had first honed in our Latin I class.
Footnote:
1 - Thanks to my friend Murph Shapiro, who remembered this declension after 40 years.
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