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Notes for the Granddaughters
This is cool. I keep a list of words that I run across that might be helpful for Arianna as she prepares for college entrance exams. Yes, I know there are books out there with these same lists but it's more fun to come across them through everyday reading. It also tells me that those words are actually being used. The other day I came across banlieues in the biography of the Impressionist painters written by Sue Ross. She used the word banlieues but I did not include it on my list of words because I thought it was too far off the English radar scope. Wrong.
Today, while thumbing through this month's issue The Atlantic, this headline: Tying Paris Back Together: can expanding the Metro unite the city and its trouble banlieues.
Through reading Virginia Woolf I was very familiar with purlieus, the area near of surrounding a place, but I do not recall seeing banlieues before. In French, banlieues are suburbs of a large city, often Paris, and are administratively separate from the large city. Grapevine, TX, for example, where we live, would be a banlieue of Ft Worth or Dallas.
"Yes, we live in Grapevine, a banlieue of Ft Worth."
Like our "potato" that final "e" is problematic. In the singular, banlieue has a final "e"; purlieu does not.
The suffix in both banlieue and purlieu should not be confused with lues, an American word. Lues comes from the Latin word meaning plague.
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