October QoD: Weekend Edition: Saturday 10-4-08

[wintergreen48]

1. Waffle = Guaffre
2. Walter = Gautier
3. War = Guerre
4. Wasp = Guêpe
5. Watch (as in ‘protect’) = Garde
6. What = Que or Quel or Quelle
7. When = Quand
8. Who = Qui
9. Why should have been Watch (as in ‘keep an eye on’) = Guetter


The circonflex accent indicates that, in Latin, the vowel was followed by an ‘s’ which has apparently moved to Mississippi or something. If you switch the ‘w’ for a ‘gu’ and if you also take into consideration the circonflex, guêpe would become ‘wespe’ which is (almost) Latin ‘Vespa’ (in Latin, the ‘v’ was-- trust me, I know this first-hand-- pronounced like the English ‘w,’ which is freaky, because in German the ‘w’ is pronounced like the English ‘v’). The other ‘circonflex’ words that I used in the example were ‘bête’ and ‘tête’ and ‘château,’ which are the modern French words for ‘beast’ and ‘head’ and ‘castle,’ whose Latin equivalents were ‘bestia’ and ‘testu’ and ‘castellum’ which mean (in Latin) ‘beast’ and ‘clay pot’ and ‘castle’ (French actually comes from the Latin of the streets rather than the Latin of Cicero, and ‘clay pot’ was the slang term that the soldiers used for ‘head,’ and this is what the French ended up with, which seems somehow appropriate; if they had known what they were doing, they would have used the more formal Latin term, which was ‘caput,’ which is where we get words like ‘capital’ and ‘decapitate’).

OK, because I screwed up by putting in ‘why’ when I meant to put in ‘Watch (as in ‘keep an eye on’),’ I figure I have to give everyone who participated credit for that answer (if you got all the others questions right, you would have gotten this one anyway, just by the process of elimination, although Chronic_Diarrhea is the BB who best excels at the process of elimination). Anyway, the maximum possible score for Saturday was 11, and the actual scores were:

jarnon = 11
a1mamacat = 9
peacock = 9
bob### = 11
beast = 10
marley = 9
killer tomato = 9
kroxquo = 10
nellylunatic = 11
jbillygirl = 10
frogman = 9
catfish = 10
jsuchard = 9
weyoun = 1
confessor = 11
ritterskoop = 9
vadame = 10
andrewjackson = 10
macrae = 10
plasticene = 11
tanstaafl = 9
anniecamaro = 11
wheresfanny = 11