One of the stove top knobs in my dorm has gone missing again. Last term one went missing, and then the second, so I had to go to the housing office to complain because I couldn't cook anything any more. The upside to the sometimes deplorable conditions of student life in France is that whenever I need to complain I learn new vocabulary words. When I first arrived I learned moldy carpet (moquette moisi). There is no French word for knob, they use bouton, the same word that is used for button. En revanche, the French have two words for ''river''. A ''fleuve'' is a river that flows into a sea or ocean, and a ''rivière'' does not. Vive la langue française!*
*The French also do some wild things with punctuation: there is apparently supposed to be a space between a colon and a preceding word. This goes for some other punctuation marks too, I think the exclamation mark is included but I'm a bit hazy about the details. One thing I'm pretty sure of.. when a nationality is used as an adjective the first letter is not capitalized... hence ''la langue française''.
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