Jeopardy Nerd
 

Anyone else catch the bike question on Jeopardy last night that nobody answered?

My fye-ance started cracking up as I screamed "DERAILLEUR! DERAILLEUR!" at the tv.

I LOVED Alex's French pronunciation!

alex and the french pronunciations crack me up. He really lays it on thick

The correct answer is "What is a derailleur?"

From the same show that accepted a previously rejected definition of "fixed drive" for "fixed gear."

-Kurt

My 8th grade English teacher, in West Texas, (who hated me) knocked me out of the school spelling bee by giving me "amateur" as A-ma-tyoor, purposely, from the gloating look in her eye when she'd cut me down. I will never forgive her, may she rot in Hell.

Well, he is (or was) Canadian, after all....born in Sudbury, Ontario, mother's first language was "Ontario French", so he comes by it honestly.

Yeah i know he's a canadian, but he's not even from Quebec :rolleyes: ...you can tell he gets a kick out of doing the french pronunciations as frenchy as possible.

:lol:

could you repeat the question? or should I say answer?

That's why I didn't make it onto show!

Yeah, instead of pronouncing "liqueur" as "lic-koor"... :wtf:

You don't have to be from Québec to have grown up in a French-speaking household in Canada. Great swaths of Northern Ontario (where Sudbury is), much of New Brunswick, and pockets of Nova Scotia, southern Ontario, Manitoba, and even Alberta speak French as a first language at home. But don't worry, the French look down their noses at us, too, since the Canadian French accent doesn't sound right in the salons of Paris.

Between her first two husbands, my wife lived in Montreal for 25 years.

Don't get her started on Quebec . . . . . . . . .:rolleyes:

I still struggle to spell it... so the abreviation "rear der."

In deference to Sheldon's ghost, I've refered to it as a "derailing thingy". So there. Nyah, nyahhh....

Thank you Mr. Wills for drawing my attention to another well written artical by the late Sheldon Brown:
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/derailer.html

I now will also spell the name for the "derailing thingy" as derailer as the late Sheldon Brown asked us to.:thumb:

My wife won't let me watch Jeopardy any more. Or That 70's Show.

When I used to yell, it was ala Red Foreman: "It's a derailleur, you dumb-a%%!"

I'm sure I'd choke just like they do, though.

Exactly. The French word for "stem" is potence (po-tahns) which also translates as "gibbet" (the "7"-shaped frame they used to hang the bodies of executed criminals from.) But we don't call stems potences (or po-tahnses) or gibbets; we call them stems. Similarly a device that derails the chain from one cog to another we should call, in English, simply a derailer. I do, and so does every English-speaking Canadian I know, even if they speak good French also. But if you are ever looking for one in a bike shop in France, it will help if you can pronounce dérailleur. French has many sounds that simply don't occur in English -- to pronounce the words so as to be understood you have to make those unfamiliar sounds. It's not laying a French accent on thick, it's how the words really sound.

What was the question?