Southern-fried French

Semantic Compositions readers know that your host is well-acquainted with fast food. Recently, a chain from Georgia called Chick-Fil-A opened its first location in SC-land. The restaurant specializes in fried chicken and all of the permutations thereof -- as a sandwich, as a nugget, as a salad accoutrement. SC went once, and became hooked immediately. Now they can't get rid of him.

Shortly after opening, they mailed coupons to everyone in the surrounding neighborhoods, including offers for a free chicken sandwich, a free chicken biscuit (if only SC could get up early enough for it!), and a free children's meal. Being a linguist, and therefore unable to resist anything free, this evening your host disgraced himself by redeeming the latter coupon. SC readers would probably pay dearly to see the smirk on the face of the cashier, which only doubled in width on account of your host's lamely ordering a regular sandwich in an effort to disguise the fact that he was buying a kids' meal. (Actually, that was required by the coupon, but it was plainly obvious that no kid was forthcoming.)

What makes this linguistically salient is the alternative to a toy which was included. Rather than a Transforming Ninja Dragon Warrior, or whatever is currently popular among the under-10 set, there was a fairly slickly-produced 24-page booklet entitled "First 500 Words: French". Inspection of the inside covers revealed that it was one of a series of five such booklets, including German, Spanish, Japanese, and Russian. Wow. Your host had previously thought that the slogan printed on the outside of the bag, "Growing Kids Inside and Out" referred only to the fact that eating fried chicken was likely to make kids larger.

Of course, children can't be expected to have mastered the International Phonetic Alphabet, so they helpfully provide transliterations in what SC thinks is a Southern U.S. accent. The article "le" is uniformly transcribed as "luh". "chien", the French word for "dog", is transliterated as "shee-an". "bicyclette", or "bicycle", gets rewritten as "bee-seeklett". "barriere" ("fence") becomes "bar-yair". There's a pronunciation guide at the front of the booklet which is delightfully age-appropriate. For example, "[W]hen you see (n) or (m) in a pronunciation, you should barely say the "n" or "m"; say the letter that is before it through your nose, as if you had a cold". And "The French "r" is made at the back of the throat and sounds a little like gargling".

Now, this all comes in the context of a chain whose advertising campaign consists of anthropomorphized cows holding up crudely painted signs saying "Eat Mor Chikin" (as well as a bunch of hysterical variations on that within the store). Orthography is not necessarily their strong point. Anything that can get kids excited about learning other languages is fantastic, though, and so SC strongly encourages his readers to consider having some mor chikin.

Comments

[blinger]

Wow. Your host had previously thought that the slogan printed on the outside of the bag, "Growing Kids Inside and Out" referred only to the fact that eating fried chicken was likely to make kids larger

I found this particularly amusing. The idea of giving away a language book is good, but I don't think it will win points with the kiddies. I also enjoyed the ads posted on that site. Particularly this one.

[Credit Repair Services]

great post found it interesting,the idea is very good.

[Seattle IT Consulting]

Thanks for sharing this idea. I know it's not been new to me but i am glad you also shared this. Good job! and Keep it up!