UnScrambling The UnFamiliar

We were watching 'French Food at Home - Chateau Special with Laura Calder' when Iman asked what is chateau? And feeling important (feeling important is a role mums have the right to play; ho-ho-ho) I proudly said, a château is a big country house in France.

I double-checked with wikipedia and true enough, it says château is a manor house or a residence of the lord or a country house. It is pronounced sh-a (as in banana)-t-o (as in boat) -- shato. Percayalah, but then again this could be the case of a blind leading the blind.

And the other day I had a tex-mex chicken roll from San Francisco cafe for lunch. I only had that because everybody else had had their lunch and rather than sit alone for mine I did the sandwich roll take-away. Tex-mex is actually short for Texan-Mexican. As the name implies, whatever Tex-Mex has its origin in Texas, with Mexican influences. The things that came to my mind are Tex-Mex food like taco (as in Taco Bell, obviously) and nachos. And also Tex-Mex music aka Tejano music (fyi that is pronounced as Tehano) and the late Selena.

There is this site that I love that has lots of Tex-Mex recipes - check it out here.

And last but not least, everybody's favorite word - voilà. This is (another French) word that literally translates to "here" in English. It's usually used as a slang term to say "taa daa" sort of expression... Also usually pronounced wrong by Americans for some reason, they like to say it like "wala."

And do continue to read this that I got from the net; written by an American, concerning this word.

Walla is a word used by retarded Americans who don't know any foreign languages and barely know their own. The correct word they are looking for is "voila", which loosely translates as "here it is", "there you go", or similar meanings. Of course, the word voila properly pronounced in French sounds a bit like "vwalla", but with the "v" in front pronounced softly, almost like an "f". Being stupid Americans though, they can't pronounce anything which doesn't sound 100% English (not that they can pronounce English either) so in their incredibly lazy way, they don't even try to pronounce it correctly.

So there you are! Or maybe I should just say, Voila!

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