MSI Press Blog

  The Textile Mill During high school, I worked summers in a textile mill in Gonic, NH. I started out as a burler (pulling knots out of freshly woven wool fabric) in the sewing room, where my grandmother and aunt were sewers (filling in the holes that the burlers made). My grandmother, aunt, and I were the only native speakers of English in that sewing room of 21 workers. The conversations during the day were lively, helping the time to pass more interestingly while mechanically sewing up holes practical reinforcement—and in a mixture of mostly New England French, some English (essentially any unbroken and continuous English mainly between my grandmother and aunt whose sewing positions were side by side), and a fair about of French-English blend typical of what happens in areas where two languages dominate. The comment that has stayed with me for more than 60 years now is that made by the women sitting in the position on my life, who was complaining that things were falling a...

  High School French My high school French courses were probably like no other. I started out in French 1 at Sanford High School (Maine), where French was pretty ubiquitous and most of the students—heck, all of the other students—in the class had already had eight years of French in elementary school and spoke it at home. The teacher that year was new. He did not know the background of his class because he had moved to Maine from Canada in order to take the job. He was young. He was handsome. He was cocky. And he did not know us! After we all sat down for the first class, he grinned, looked around, and found a pretty girl in the front seat in one of the rows. Thinking no one would understand, he jokingly asked, “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” [Do you want to sleep with me?]—not something acceptable in this day and age but back then would be taken as a joke.) For him, the joke was that he had said something fresh, but immediately the joke was on him. Our classmate looked him up and ...

  French Although French was technically the fourth language I began to study (after English, my native tongue, Latin, and Spanish), in some ways it could also be considered my second language or even a shared first language since I was surrounded by French from birth. I was born in New Hampshire some 60+ years ago and grew up in a small village there until I was 14, at which time my parents moved across the Salmon Falls River to a farm in Maine. In the 1940s and 1950s (and even in the 1960s), Maine and New Hampshire were strongholds of French-speaking Americans, not immigrants but families who had been there for generations, often with relatives in Canada (like we Anglophones among them), and an interesting mix of languages developed. Growing up in a francophone region in a New Hampshire village and, later, on a Maine farm meant that I always had heard French around me. I did not pay much attention to it, however, my parents usually frequented Anglophone haunts. I decided to t...

My brother, Charles, visited Paris a few weeks earlier than I did in the spring of 1988. Before my trip, he instructed me three or four times to buy a French phrase book. I didn’t understand his insistence on this matter. He spoke fluent French, so his advice wasn’t based on his own needs. After being told for the umpteenth time to buy the book, I went to a bookstore and purchased one. This was two decades before smart phones were available, which can now translate for travelers. My brother must have been psychic, because my host in Paris, a friend from high school, had a family emergency and had to return home to the U.S. after the first day of my six-day visit. My trip to Paris would have been much more challenging without the little phrase book. Eight years later, I worked for a large AIDS Service Agency full of young people with extra cash. My colleagues were always darting off to Europe on vacation. I lent my little phrase book out several times, and it was always recei...