CREME DE LA CREME
It’s not a name of a French cuisine, nor is it a name of a French patisserie. Yes, it’s a French expression. This expression, like any other expression, bears more semantic components than just what appears in the dictionary. Take the word ‘best’ which more or less has a similar meaning with this expression. No matter how overlapping they are semantically, people will still perceive them to have a different nuance. Try to use them in a different sentences and feel the difference!
The history of word refered to as etimology is closely connected to the context in which it is used. France is quite famous for their pride to use their own language, simply because of their political supremacy in the past. Using one or two words of french in an english conversation will still reflects the sense of supremacy which actually has long been buried in the backyard. The language used in a day to day conversation is just one of the culutral artefact.
It’s not a name of a French cuisine, nor is it a name of a French patisserie. Yes, it’s a French expression. This expression, like any other expression, bears more semantic components than just what appears in the dictionary. Take the word ‘best’ which more or less has a similar meaning with this expression. No matter how overlapping they are semantically, people will still perceive them to have a different nuance. Try to use them in a different sentences and feel the difference!
The history of word refered to as etimology is closely connected to the context in which it is used. France is quite famous for their pride to use their own language, simply because of their political supremacy in the past. Using one or two words of french in an english conversation will still reflects the sense of supremacy which actually has long been buried in the backyard. The language used in a day to day conversation is just one of the culutral artefact.
The same case happens to our language. The fact that english is considered as one out of the five international languages, has created similar phenomena. Just observed the blossoming soap operas on our television programmes. Even an english way of pronouncing indonesian words is correlated to a particular social status.
This is a real conversation occured in my office: "At the end of the day, kita harus memiliki capability untuk beradaptasi terhadap lingkungan yang terus berubah. Hanya the creme de la creme yang akan survive di masa depan!!!. Voila... c'est tout!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment