I should be more motivated to brush up on my French before we head to the Olympics

Nice job with a "stereotypical French guy" photo, AI Blog Post Image Generator!

One of my favorite things about traveling to French-speaking areas of the world is getting the chance to put my 14 years of French language education to use.

As I've chronicled here before, I grew up in a school district where everybody took French in 1st through 6th grades. I continued taking it throughout middle and high schools, and nearly pulled off a minor in the subject with three years of additional French classes at John Carroll University.

The result has been that, on my eight or nine combined trips to Montreal and Paris over the years, I've been able to hold my own when it came to ordering in a restaurant, asking directions, getting answers to simple questions on the street, etc.

Actually, I've held my own in Paris much more than in Montreal. The Quebecois accent is such that my Parisian French education, combined with my Northeast Ohio inflection, renders me as unintelligible to some Montrealers as they are to me.

The point is, I know some French. Having not used it much, I read it much better than I speak it.

My daughter Elissa had almost as much French education as me and has taken actual French classes in recent years as an adult. She and I (along with Terry and Elissa's boyfriend Mark) are scheduled to arrive in Paris 16 weeks from today to take in some Summer Olympics events and generally see the sites as we're able.

I figure that, with our collective French proficiency and past experience in Paris, we should navigate just fine in the City of Light.

But I'm not going out of my way to review French vocabulary and syntax before we jet off to the continent. I should, but I'm not.

There are any number of excuses I can give for this, but the reality is that I'm simply a lazy American.

Language-wise (and many other wises), we are among the most spoiled people on earth. There are few places we can go where people won't either willingly speak English to us, or else roll their eyes and switch to English because we're obviously not going to make the effort to learn their language.

This is even worse because I mostly know their language. It wouldn't take much for me to get back into Francophone shape, but especially with a multi-cultural event like the Olympics, it will be easy to get around using only English.

I'm hoping to get more motivated between now and early August, but don't bet on it.

C'est la vie.

When the folks at 23andMe give you permission to be more Irish than you thought

For many years, St. Patrick's Day never seemed especially relevant to me. I know it's the day when we're all supposed to be Irish, but biologically speaking, I figured I was English, Scottish, German, and not much else.

Wearing green and walking around with a shillelagh in one hand and a Guinness in the other seemed a tad inauthentic.

Then, a couple of years ago, at my request, Terry got me a 23andMe genetic testing kit for Christmas. I sent off a dollop of spit to their labs and eagerly opened my ancestry report weeks later when it arrived via email.

I am no geneticist, so I can't speak to the accuracy of these mass-market, saliva-based tests. I hear and read good things, but the results are sometimes so precise as to evoke a level of skepticism.

I choose to believe the 23andMe test is reliable, though, if only because I like what the results had to say.

Yes, I am mostly English. And yes, there's indubitably some German blood in me, thanks to my maternal grandmother, one Ms. Bertha Spitznogel.

I was surprised to have Swiss and French roots, as well.

What really caught my eye, though, is that I'm 47.9% "British & Irish." When you break that down further by region, I'm classified as a "Highly Likely Match" for both "Galway and Central Ireland" and "Central and Southern Ireland," not to mention being a "Likely Match" for "Central and Northern Ireland" and "Northern Ireland and Central Scottish Lowlands."

Well, top of the mornin', kiss the Blarney Stone, and keep your hands off me Lucky Charms! Who knew?

Of course, I don't know exactly how much of my ancestry is Irish, but it's apparently more than the <0.1% I originally assumed. And that whole thing about me being of Scottish origin? Maybe not so much.

With St. Patrick's Day now just 48 hours away, I feel much more justified laying some small claim to the holiday. Maybe I'll sip a green beer on Sunday and listen to Irish pipe bands.

The English side of me will hate it, of course, but I can shut down that part of my brain for one day, at least.

I was floored to discover four out of every five people in the world are younger than me

The AI Blog Post Image Generator has been doing so well lately, but when I prompted it with "How did I get to be so old?" it returned this. I can't tell whether it's spot on for today's post or simply horrifying.

Not long ago, I stumbled across a fun little app housed on the website of France's Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques, which as you might imagine translates to the "National Institute of Demographic Studies."

My use of the word "fun" in connection with an organization that studies population trends may feel like a stretch. But I'm telling you, this small section of their site is interesting. They call it "The World Population and Me," and you can access it by clicking anywhere in this sentence.

(Don't worry, it's in English.)

The first thing it asks you to do is enter your age, which in my case is 54. This immediately generated a fascinating comparison between the world population when I was born in 1969 (about 3.7 billion) and what it is today (around 8.1 billion).

That's a huge increase in a relatively short amount of time, but that wasn't what really grabbed me.

What knocked me for a loop was when I clicked on "My Place in the Population."

Doing this revealed that, as of this moment, 79% of the people in the world are younger than me, while 21% are older.

I don't know what I thought those percentages were going to be, but...I'm older than nearly 80% of current humans? What??

I had to sit down for a moment.

The ratio somewhat improved when I limited it to just the United States. A full 32% of the population here is older than me, presumably thanks to longer American life expectancies vs. some other parts of the world.

Still, it does give you perspective. Maybe "too much perspective," as the boys in Spinal Tap might say.

Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I plan to be around for a long, long time. I don't know if that's what God is planning, but that's my expectation.

It's just that sometimes the math redefines the parameters of "a long, long time," at which point I have to sit down again.

And maybe watch an episode or two of Matlock.

Celebrating all things French today (except French fries, which aren't French anyway)

Today is Bastille Day. I'm always reminded that, on this day in 1989, my friend Kevin and I went to our high school French teacher's house unannounced and drank wine with her in celebration of the holiday.

I give Madame Whitehorn credit for being so gracious to us. She was under no obligation to invite two former students (who showed up unexpectedly on her doorstep) into her home on a mid-summer Friday morning.

Yet she did, and she remains one of my favorite teachers ever.

As I've mentioned, I took 14 years of French classes between the Wickliffe City Schools and John Carroll University, so I have a deep interest in French language and culture. It also doesn't hurt that, as a First World War buff, I have a relatively detailed knowledge of the geography of Northeastern France, where so many battles were fought.

By the way, contrary to what you may think you know about France's military history, the French army was a tough out in WW1. The Germans had deep respect for their tenacity and fighting capacity.

I've visited France twice, and both times I was in Paris. I've only scratched the surface of things to see and do there, but I do also someday hope to make it "en province," as they say, and experience some of the non-Parisian parts of the country.

The closest most Ohioans get to all things French is visiting some part of Francophone Canada. I have been to Montreal four times, and while it's lovely, it's not the real thing.

Nor should it be. It is a wonderful city with a mystique and culture all its own.

French people have a reputation for being rude and snooty, and I'm sure many are (just as many Americans are). But in the combined four days I've spent in France, the people I met were nothing but kind and gracious.

That includes the French woman whose job it apparently was to stand in the men's room while I peed at the Gare de Nord train station in 1999. I don't know if she kept any notes on customer behavior, but if she did, I'm sure she noted my exceptional cleanliness and respect for French urinals.

I'm glad we learned French in grade school in my town

I've mentioned this before, but I grew up in a school district where everyone took French from the time they were in first grade.

I actually studied the language nonstop from the age of 6 through my third year of college. I am not fluent in it because I was never in a situation where I was forced to speak it in order to survive, but I can read it fairly well, and my vocabulary is still pretty expansive.

The advantages of having taken French at such a young age were not limited to a better understanding of the French language and Franophone culture in general. It also gave me a better command of English. I've always said the French composition class I took at John Carroll advanced my writing skills more than any English composition class could have.

It also helped that I enjoyed all of the French teachers I had (all of whom, with one exception in college, were female, by the way). There was old Madame McCoy in the early grades. She would push her little cart of French books and flash cards from classroom to classroom and try her best to get us to learn the most basic French words.

Later it was Mademoiselles Chader and Gagliano, then Mesdames Rees and Whitehorn. They were all excellent teachers, and each left an indelible impression on me.

Mlle. Gagliano later became Madame Pumphrey, and we remain Facebook friends to this day. In sixth grade I remember her having us do a project that resulted in me writing a one-man play that I acted out in class, all in terrible, terrible French. But it was such a beneficial exercise because it forced me to make good use of my French-English dictionary, and it gave me a better understanding of verb conjugation and tenses, which were the major focus of instruction in Madame Rees' class the following year.

Wickliffe, like most public school districts of which I know, has long since abandoned the practice of elementary-school language instruction, which is too bad. I assume it's a matter of resources and the effects of state testing, but I feel it's a huge loss. If nothing else, taking a language when you're very young works so well because you're such a sponge for picking up new words at that age.

Of course, it wasn't too hard to remember the French words for "weekend" and "hot dog," which as I recall were "le weekend" and "l'hot dog." I think I aced the quiz the week those were on the vocabulary list.

I'm American, so I only speak American

In a couple of weeks I'll be jetting off to Frankfurt for a business trip. I'll spend four days or so in Germany, and then another two in London before returning home.

This will be my second time in Germany and my third time in the UK, and I think both countries are great.

That's partly because there's virtually no language barrier in either. They invented English in the UK (though I naively like to think we in the U.S. perfected it), and virtually everyone I ran into during my first trip to Germany spoke English. Excellent English, in fact. It was weird.

I mentioned to several Germans how stunned I was at their ability not only to speak my language, but to speak it so fluently. One woman with whom I regularly work at our German public relations firm at times has no accent whatsoever when she speaks English. It's like she's from Iowa.

Generally their response is something along the lines of, "Well, we learn English in school at a young age, and of course we're bombarded by American culture and American TV shows and movies all the time."

Which always makes me feel bad. Not only that relatively few of us in the U.S. bother to learn a second language well, but that our influence is everywhere and we sort of take for granted that that's the way it should be.

A lot of Americans take foreign languages in high school, but that seems way, way too late to start. The time to start learning a language is when you're really young and you're an absolute sponge for vocabulary and pronunciation.

When I was growing up in the Wickliffe school district, everyone took French class from the time they were in first grade. In fact, I took French every year from first grade through my third year in college.

You would think that would make me fluent, but I'm not. I can read it fairly well, and I can get by in a conversation if the person to whom I'm speaking talks slowly. But I never spent any significant amount of time in a Francophone country, and therefore I was never forced to really learn the language the way you are when you're immersed in a culture and have no choice but to learn the words or be utterly lost.

Nowadays Wickliffe has gone to a more traditional model whereby the kids don't get any exposure to foreign languages until sixth grade, and even then the only choices are French and Spanish.

It probably makes more sense in today's world to learn Mandarin, or maybe even Russian or Arabic. But regardless of what language you take, there is value in the learning itself. Taking a foreign language forces you to think in new and unfamiliar ways, presumably forging new pathways in your brain and making you smarter and all of that stuff.

But I'm American, and  I will likely die knowing only how to say "Please open the window" in French and how to count to 10 in Japanese.

Which puts me ahead of about 99% of my countrymen. Sigh.

Learning a dead language for no good reason

I'm teaching myself Latin. By reading a book. The book is called "Latin for Dummies." I'm doing it because I thought Greek would be too hard.

Everything in that first paragraph is true. Or, as our ancient Romans friends would have said, "Omnia in illa prima paragraph verum est." I think. My Latin isn't very good yet.

I do a lot of things that no one else would bother doing. Learning Latin from a book is one. Walking 17 miles to work is another. Rooting for the Cleveland Browns is yet another.

None of those activities has a useful purpose, which is why I do them. I remember useless stuff. I engage in useless pastimes. I think about useless things. I am completely useless (or again, as a native Latin speaker would say, "Ego sum prorsus inutilis.")

The problem I'm finding with Latin is that it seems to have little connection with English in terms of word order and verb conjugation. That's probably not entirely true, but I'm early in the learning process and my head is spinning trying to figure out stuff like cases and declensions.

"Latin for Dummies" tries its best to give you Latin phrases you might actually find useful, but that's the problem with a dead language: There are no useful phrases. I don't foresee running into one of the Caesars any time soon, so whatever knowledge I gain in this process is going to be gained for the sake of....well, knowledge.

This is an actual sample conversation offered up on pages 68 and 69 of "Latin for Dummies" (I am not, I assure you, making this up):


PATER (father):  Nepos noster uxorem cupit. ("Our grandson wishes for a wife.")

MATER (mother): Pater filio puellam aptam inveniet. ("His father will find his son a suitable girl.")

PATER: Era difficile fratri meo ubi coniugem filiae suae petebat. ("It was difficult for my brother when he was seeking a husband for his daughter.")

MATER: Sed fratris tui filia est non pulchra! ("But your brother's daughter is not pretty!")

PATER: Screw-us you-us! ("I disagree!") (NOTE: This last line is one that I may actually have made up.)


I'm trying to think of a situation in which knowing these sentences would be useful in any language.

Because that's the general problem with language instruction, isn't it? They teach you all kinds of vocabulary and phrases that are, like me, useless.

I took 14 years of French instruction. That's right, 14 years. Everyone in my school took it from 1st through 6th grade, then most of us continued on in middle school, and a dwindling number continued on through high school.

During my senior year, there were two of us (me and Michelle Dillard) who took the comically unnecessary French V. It wasn't even a class offered during regular school hours. I had to come in at 6:30 on Thursday mornings to take it (by myself...Michelle did it at a separate time) with Madame Whitehorn, a saint of a woman who put up with the 98% of kids who didn't care at all for French to enjoy teaching the 2% who did.

Anyway, I went on to take a few semesters more from the Jesuits at John Carroll University, who at least had the decency to offer up a native French speaker (Monsieur Aube, an aging and hilarious French-Canadian) to teach those of us who tested into 300-level French.

My point is, through all those years of French, I learned maybe four or five things that had any practical value. And by "practical value," I mean stuff I could actually use if I spent any amount of time in Paris.

The French textbooks refused to impart this type of knowledge on us. Instead, they focused on unrealistic classroom situations in which everyone asked for pencils, erased blackboards, and opened and closed doors and windows. And that was about it.

I spent nine hours in Paris once, and not once did I have a need to erase any blackboards or ask anyone for a pencil. I did open and close a few doors, but I didn't bother to inform the Parisians of my door-swinging intentions.

Here are five things that WOULD have been useful to know in French during my short time in Paris, had I figured out how to say them:

(1) "Wait, you're an old woman and you're going to stay here in the men's room cleaning while I stand over there and pee?"

(2) "Really?"

(3) "Because it's awfully hard to pee with you in the room."

(4) "I'm just saying."

(5) "I've missed the last train back to my hotel in London? Is there a particular patch of sidewalk where you would suggest I sleep tonight while I wait for the first train tomorrow morning?"

By the way, I was going to render one of those suggested French sentences in Latin, just to continue the ongoing joke and all. And I realized there was no way I would know the Latin for "pee," so I looked in a Latin dictionary. It turns out the word for "urinate" is "micturio." Finally, something useful!

Homework and the useless father

There comes a time in the life of every parent when they are forced, however grudgingly, to acknowledge a painful reality:

They can no longer help their children with homework.

It hurts to admit this, because what you're essentially saying is, "Yes, this person whose diaper I used to change as recently as 10 minutes ago, it seems, is now learning things that are beyond my capacity to understand. Or if I do have the capacity to learn them, I certainly don't have the time or inclination."

There is no clear-cut dividing line between the time when I was Smart Daddy and when I became Clueless Daddy on the homework front. That's partly because the complexity of your child's schoolwork increases very gradually, and partly because it happens more quickly in some subjects than others.

Take math, for example. My daughter Elissa is studying calculus this year. I never took calculus. I managed to get a college degree from a highly regarded institution of higher learning, yet they never forced me to take calculus. In retrospect, that doesn't seem right.

The end result is that, when Elissa is having trouble with calculus, she knows it's absolutely no use coming to me. Really, if she approached me for help with calculus homework, I would break down crying then and there and ask if there was something easier I could do for her - like building a working model of the solar system out of Corn Flakes.

The same goes with Chloe's geometry homework, and both of the girls' high school-level science homework. Just not my thing. But an English or history essay? Ah, now we're in my territory. No matter how far my kids climb up the academic ladder, I'm confident I will always be able to edit their papers. Writing and editing are what I do every day. That's my sweet spot. Even if I don't fully understand the content, I can make it sound good.

Jared is right about in my transition zone. He's in 7th grade, which is the time when everything starts getting more difficult and out of my Middle-Aged Guy Sphere of Knowledge. Fortunately, Jared is a pretty smart kid and rarely needs help. And when he does, it's in French. I got a pretty solid grounding in French, having taken 14 years of instruction in the language (from 1st grade all the way through my junior year in college). I can still conjugate most of the common verbs, and my vocabulary isn't bad, either. French I can do.

Melanie has been coming home the last couple of years with what would seem to be simple arithmetic problems. Right now they're multiplying three-digit numbers. Easy, right? Well, yeah, I can get the correct answer. It's just that they've changed the method on me.

You remember how we were taught to multiply multi-digit numbers, right? It was a pretty straightforward process of multiplying the top row by each bottom-row digit one at a time, and adding together the resulting products. Short of breaking out a calculator, that's the only way I know how to do it, and it's what the good people who comprised the faculty of Mapledale Elementary School taught me.

But it's not what they teach now, apparently. Now they have the kids breaking out the numbers by the hundreds, tens and ones places in a process that at first seemed to me to be a lot more work until I realized it's actually no harder than the old-fashioned method. AND it would appear to help them understand numerical relationships better. With all my heart I want to scream, "Why can't they just do it the way we used to do it and leave well enough alone?" And all the while I'm thinking to myself, "Hey, this is actually pretty cool."

Jack, meanwhile, is in kindergarten. I can still totally dominate kindergarten. There's nothing school-related Jack asks that I can't answer, which is why he still thinks I know everything. I want this phase to last as long as possible because he's my youngest and therefore the last kid who's going to think that, and I know when the day comes that he starts asking me about quadratic equations, I'll have no choice but to break out the Corn Flakes.