[gatitoverde]

Yesterday, I began making French flashcards based on my experiences in North Carolina over the last four months. One of the more important incidents was my having gotten hit by a car, which caused my shin to swell up something awful. Searching for a way to say this, I entered gonflé comme, swollen up like, in Yahoo's browser. Aside from several comparisons common enough in English (balloon, sail or flag, melon, toad, sponge, tumor), I found a few repeat results rather interesting for their commentary on French culture--several having to do with food, and specifically baked goods--or simply because it would not have occured to me to make the same metaphor:

- une chair (à saucisse) - sausage
- un outre - wineskin
- un cycliste / un vélo - bicyclist
- un gâteau - cake
- la farine - flour
- un abricot - apricot
- un ventre / un estomac - stomach
- une piscine(couverte) - indoor swimming pool,

and disturbingly,

- un noyé - victim of drowning.

And although I only found only one occurence of each of the following, they reenforce the idea that the French are in love with their food. The first has a distinctly French sound:

- le fruit qu'on presse - the fruit that one squeezes / I squeeze
- un soufflet
- un oeuf poché - a poached egg

I plan to do the same exercise in German, and I figure if anybody's interested, they can share some of the more common Spanish variations.