I’m almost there, except every once in a blue moon I come across a website or service (usually gov’t related) that refuses to take my proton.me address.

Plumber of 12 years here, mostly in North America but also did a year in western Europe. Caulk or no caulk is situational.

In residential situations (houses or apartments) I prefer to do the no caulk method. When homeowners see water, they generally realise there is a problem and they call a plumber before the floor rots out; if the toilet is caulked, the standing water can do a shit ton of damage before it gets noticed. Also, silicone / caulk gets nasty looking very quickly without regular cleaning. I only ever installed wall-hung toilets in Europe, and we caulked the bowls but they generally never leak so it’s less of an issue.

In commercial situations, like public bathrooms, I’ll caulk the bowl, leaving a small gap at the very back so that a leak can potentially be detected. These types of installations are almost always on some type of concrete and tile floor, so damage to the floor is much less likely to occur. Also, those toilets take muuuch more abuse than one in a residential home, so the layer of caulk helps secure the toilet from displacement. Additionally, most public bathrooms are cleaned on a (hopefully) regular basis, so the caulking tends to stay a little less nasty looking.

Try being Canadian, it’s even more insulting!

Although to be fair, this never happens outside of Paris.

Imo, it’s a combination of that, and really outdated teaching methods.

La Francophonie is large enough that people never need another language to access additional information. They even have their own pronunciations for Anglophone celebrities, which is bizarre at first.

I once had a conversation in a bar where people were talking about a famous musician named ‘Kenny West.’ My friends were astonished that I had never heard of him. It took me like 5 minutes to realise that they were talking about Kanye West…

Like I mean come on, he says his own name constantly in his own songs…

For sure. Being a native English speaker, it’s worth paying a little extra to go to the cinema in Switzerland for me.

The French don’t do subtitles, they dub everything.

It’s horrible.

I still say ‘biffed it’ sometimes.

Ex: “You fucking biffed it hard on that last jump there, bud.”

He probably didn’t want to deal with the air he would’ve introduced into the system. Or he was extremely lazy. Or both aha.

Realistically, the pressure was probably less than 1 PSI, as residential gas is measured in “inches of water column,” especially after the regulator. Where I did gas work, even before the regulator was never more than 2 PSI.

Gas is verrrry simple in almost all single family home applications. If you test all the joints with soapy water (with the gas turned on) you will find any leaks very quickly. I know it’s scary, but water will do much, much more damage in a small amount of time than gas. Of course, if you’re simply not comfortable doing it, hire a professional, but trust me, if lazy apprentices who don’t think past their next vape hit can do it, so can you.

Age of Empires Il still has a very active scene with new content all the time. In fact there’s a new expansion dropping this week!

My francophone wife practiced saying squirrel for like 7 years before she was able to get it kinda right, so that’s very impressive if true. It doesn’t help that in my accent, it’s pronounced as one syllable. Even good approximations of the pronunciation that I’ve heard by French speakers are usually done in two syllables.

Does DE count?

It’s crazy that new expansions are still dropping, and the ranked community is thriving.

They’re just so ubiquitous in English. In my experience, people coming from the Romance languages have a very hard time with them, because most of the actions they describe are a single verb in their mother tongues. Imagine having to remember what two words mean, but then also having to remember that when you use the two words together, they form a distinct, sometimes even unrelated, meaning.

And there’s thousands.

Typical.

La richesse de la langue ne cesse jamais de m’étonner.

It sounds ridiculous to us, but that’s just how they talk. It also works in reverse for them; I sometimes have to remind my spouse when we’re among English speakers that she sounds like she doesn’t have enough mash potatoes in her mouth.

Pure poetry.

In French, it’s ‘le pénis,’ but nobody says that. ‘Dick,’ is feminine (la bite.)

Also, ‘vagina’ is masculine, but ‘pussy’ is feminine, because if you were to say ‘le chat’ it would mean a cat, but by feminising the word, it becomes ‘la chatte,’ meaning pussy.

As someone who grew up Anglophone, I actually find gendered languages much more precise. On the other hand, in order to make yourself understood one must have a rich vocabulary, because the definitions of words are often more narrow than in English.

And don’t even get me started on phrasal verbs… English is messy.

Exactly.

After a while, most words (with exceptions) just ‘feel’ like one gender or the other, but nobody ever thinks about it in terms of ‘sex’. I barely even think about it at all, and I’ve only been speaking French daily for a couple years at this point.

Although it still bothers me that ‘silicone’ is feminine. It’s just not logical.

Henriette Walter. Her works on French linguistics are both fascinating and informative.

Iris Murdoch. I’ve only read The Sea, The Sea, but it’s one of the books that got me into literature when I was a teenager. I really need to get around to exploring more of her work.

Ouch, I wasn’t privy to the particulars, nor am I a resident of Switzerland, merely an admirer of how things are run there (usually). I guess the people’s notions of liberty aren’t as strong there as I had thought!