Bullets over Tuesday

• Three cups of green tea seems like a good idea on a frosty morning until you remember you'll be riding the bus.
• On the bus a colleague informed me that the latest research shows you can't keep up with more than 150 friends. He then asked, "So how many friends do you have on Facebook?" Someone obviously needs to learn the distinction between "friends" and "Friends".
• Sucking lemons as a headache remedy--has anyone heard of this before or was Brick Shithouse just taking the piss?
• I don't know where that hideous little cabinet in the vestibule of our building came from, I only know that it isn't long for this world.

Fromage et ___?

crackers, biscuits secs, biscuits salés (français européen)
craquettes (français cadien)
craquelins (français québécois)

Funny, isn't it, how you take certain foods for granted? When I was younger, it never would've occurred to me that crackers weren't a universal snack, let alone that the classic pairing of cheese and crackers was more or less specific to the Anglosphere. The first French word I learned for "crackers" was the Québécois term since as a child I favoured a brand of stone-milled wheat crackers from Canada which were bilingually labeled craquelins de blé. (Clearly if the French ate them, everyone else must've as well!)

It's interesting to compare the degrees of accommodation for this loanword into French, from the unmodified European French loan cracker through the slight adaption of Cajun French craquette to the Canadian loan-translation. (Cf. craqueler "to crack", a diminutive of craquer "to split, to crack", itself ultimately from the same Germanic source as the English word.) The alternative EF terms seem to be only approximations; Wikipédia informs me, for instance, that "les crackers...sont une variété de biscuits secs anglais".