So I was driving into town with all 3 kids in the back of the car tonight. They asked me to put on the cd of High School Musical. 'Is that your favourite record at the moment guys?' I asked. Blank stares. 'Record?' 'Surely you have seen a record - you know like a big black cd?' I asked. 'No never', they both replied. Oh my God, how old am I? It is funny to think both my grandmothers died before ever hearing the word cd and yet my kids don't know records. My Granny even worked in a record shop when she wasn't playing piano in a night club! Anyway they eventually remembered they had once seen a record on an episode of Tom and Jerry. When were they made? 1950s?
Oh and Tom and Jerry itself is an odd one. Everyone in the world knows they are both boys but my kids insist and have done all their lives that Jerry is a girl. I thought that they were confusing with the name Geri, but no it is more cryptic than that! Being French bilingual they know it is un chat but une souris but the non-French part of their brains uses this information to assign gender, something a real monolingual French person would never do. How cool is that?
3 comments:
Are you sure a monolingual French person would never do anything like that? I once had a poster made by a Norwegian artist, depicting the moon as a man and the sun as a woman (in Nynorsk, moon is masculine, and sun in feminine. I happened to mention this to a French speaker, and he was really surprised. I didn't tell him about grammatical genders at all, only about the poster itself, but his instinctive reaction was "but that's wrong – the sun should be the man, and the moon the woman!" (In Romance languages, moon is feminine, and sun is masculine.)
I think you have a point - I mean powerful, genderless things like the sun and the moon can often be depicted stereotypically but I think that things that actually have genders in real life like cats and mice are not seen so much as having a particular gender based on their (in)definite article.
What a pair of NERDS you two are !!
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