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french poem about spider
Vous êtes le bienvenu(e), monsieurdame ! Et pourtant … To our great confoundment, we are
forced to confess, that hitherto we
have had no such offering. This
yawning gap we now hasten to amend, as follows:
Que
not’ frère l’araigne
ce tribut
ne dédaigne
car il comble
un vide:
ce poème
arachnoïde
Philological note:
Spiders speak a more classical, even old-fashioned, variety
of French, than what you and I learned in class. Their word for ‘spider’ is the chastely Latinate araigne, from Latin ARANEA (cf. Spanish araña). The modern bastardization is araignée, which by rights should mean
“spiderweb” or maybe “spider-clowder” (though I personally have never
witnessed a clowder of
spiders; they tend to be rather
standoffish).
I would also love to report that dédaigne
was the subjunctive of an archaic *dédaindre; but alas, ‘tis not so, it’s dédaigner (from DIGNARI) all the way
down. (Immediately related to our
English verb deign, btw, and more
distantly to the noun dignity, from
the Latin source.)
*
Pour d’autres
friandises
de la confiserie
du docteur Justice,
consultez:
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