Saturday, October 12, 2013

stairway to ...


This stairway takes you to the top of the castle keep at Loches.  But before climbing those stairs let me take you on a little linguistic side trip.  A keep is a tall defensive tower.  In French, the word keep is donjon which sounds a lot like the English dungeon.  Of course a dungeon is just the opposite, a deep underground prison where nasty things happen to people.  Anyway, this is what is called in French a faux-ami, litteraly in English false friend... a word similar to an English word but means something totally different.  While this example won't get you into much trouble here, there are others that definitely will.

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