Odd Thoughts

It has been nearly a month since my last post, and I plan to do some catching up, as time's a-wastin'.

* * * * * *

In trying to learn a Romance language, I find that the most difficult part is to distinguish between nouns that are masculine versus those that are feminine. Sure, there are other parts of grammar that one must pay attention to, not least of which are verb conjugations, idiomatic phrases, and such. But for me the chief concern is gender.

Why, for example, should certain words in Spanish and Portuguese which end in ‘a’ -- words like ‘dia’ (day), ‘cinema’ (cinema) be considered masculine, while words ending in ‘o’ -- like ‘mano’ or ‘mão’ (hand, in Spanish and Portuguese respectively) be considered feminine. It just does not seem to make any sense.

* * * * *

The other day at a rather upscale Chinese restaurant, I saw an item on the menu that intrigued me: ‘Prophet fish filled with brown sauce.’

It turns out that ‘pomfret’ had been misspelt, and that it should have been ‘fillet’ instead of ‘filled’. How it was to be filled with brown sauce, and whatever flavor or shade of brown the sauce might have been, must have caused some diners to wonder.