Someone please tell me what does “smoke and mirrors” phrase mean ? Often times I hear “smoke and mirrors” but I don’t understand what it actually means
In Albert Camus's novel La chute / The Fall, the main character
talks about his life to an unnamed listener. In the second chapter, he
makes the following statement while talking about friends and relatives:
Quant à ceux dont c’est la fonction de nous aimer, je veux dire les parents, les al...
> By the way, if you’re reading your text and are confused by the fact that Jean-Baptiste exclaims, "Oh, the Bazaines," furrow that brow no further. François Achille Bazaine was a French military officer known for being a traitor. When Jean-Baptiste notes the deadly-rifle-shot-phone-calls of family members, he’s actually calling out those relatives as traitors.
Francois Achille Bazaine's Wikipedia page also says it's him that Camus is referring to. But neither Shmoop nor Wikipedia are reliable sources, so I'm hesitant to post an answer based on this.
Is he? What puzzles me is that the word "Bazaine" is singular but the article "les" is plural. Could it be that "les Bazaine" signifies multiple people (the family members) all seen as being like a single Bazaine?
@Randal'Thor That's one of the curious features of the French language: when you refer to a family, you use the plural "les", but you don't modify the family name itself. Hence "les Bazaine", without adding an "s" to the family name.
It's very unintuitive from the point of view of several other languages, such as English and Dutch. It must be even stranger from the point of view of languages that modify family names depending on whether the person is a man or a woman (Kasparov vs. Kasparova) or more generally, languages where the case system also applies to names.
I'm an English learner and want to know some English poems and songs.
Any popular poem or song that portrays quiet rain is worthy of my studying.
Both real and fictional rain are OK, as long as the rain does something noiselessly.
As long as the poems and songs literally write rain, it doesn't...
Today is also the birthday of the German author Ludwig Tieck, the French poet and Nobel laureate Saint-John Perse and the Russian poet Konstantin Paustovsky.
I won't try to describe its pronunciation. You can here listen to how a native speaker of Japanese pronounces tsundoku / 積ん読 (on Forvo.com).
"Perhaps there are professors of literature who lap up the adventures of Rupert Bear by torchlight under the bedclothes at night." Terry Eagleton in How to Read Literature (last chapter).
Since they both deal with themes of materiality and class, i was wondering, if i were to write an essay on the similarities of them both, what should i include?
In accordance with our meta agreement to have topic challenges
and a later meta agreement to have topic challenges lasting for two months and overlapping by one month,
it is time to announce the July–August 2020 topic challenge.
Based on the number of votes, the seventh topic challenge of the ye...
@Librarian The suggestion had reached 5 votes, breaking the tie with The Shahnameh. So now we'll have a Japanese topic challenged suggested from a Japanese username.
I am doing some research on the work of Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo. My work is about the concept of vengeance/revenge in the book. By now, i'm looking for material to begin with, but has been imposible for me to find material about the subject (essays, articles, academic works...). Looking ...