So, I was buying lunch in a sushi shop in Paris and at the end of the transaction, after

I'd already paid and the man was handing me the bag, he turned to me and he said,

Vruvili de baguette.

Would you like some baguettes?

And when you're new to a foreign country and a foreign language,

often when you don't understand something, there's context and you can figure out exactly what's

being said. For example, when they're asking in a supermarket if you want a plastic bag,

they're holding up the plastic bag, you know? In this case, the man at the

sushi shop had asked me if I wanted some baguettes and I had no context. I couldn't figure it out

why he was offering me bread with sushi. And I thought, is that how they do it in Paris? They eat sushi with baguettes.

No context, had no idea it was going on. He looked at me. I looked at him. I wanted to say no,

but I realized I was misunderstanding something. When it dawned on both of us that I wasn't a French

man and he held up some chopsticks and he said, the baguettes,

the baguettes. And I said, oh, de baguettes. And I realized at that moment that the word in French for

chopsticks is baguette. And it was just a, I don't know, a little anecdote about the French language that once you know, you know.

But it got me thinking at the time, how many things does baguette actually mean?

So what I did at the time, as I looked it up, I found out that in the official, or the popular

French dictionary, La Russ, that the word baguette has 15 different definitions. And at the time,

I turned it into a blog post that over the years has turned into one of the most popular

blog posts I've ever done, but I don't think I haven't mentioned it on this podcast. So for today's short episode of the Yearful Tower,

I'm going to tell you a few things that this word means,

and hopefully this will be a little language oddity

...