Created: Thursday, 17 April 2014 00:00

Since we’ve just celebrated May Day we thought it would be a good time to share an interesting “Mayday morsel” with all our Fun Languages fans. And it has nothing to do with an ancient Northern Hemisphere Spring festival or celebrating the achievements of workers!

What we’re talking about is the emergency code word “Mayday” used internationally as a distress signal in voice procedure radio communications.

Did you know …

The Mayday procedure word originated in 1923 with Frederick Stanley Mockford a senior radio officer at Croydon Airport in London. Mockford was asked to think of a word that would indicate distress and would easily be understood by all pilots and ground staff in an emergency. Since much of the traffic at the time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, he proposed the word “Mayday” from the French “m’aider” (shortening of venez m’aider “come help me!”)

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“The days are long, but the years are short” – Gretchen Rubin “The Happiness Project”

Raising children does funny things to our perception of time!

Days or hours can pass agonisingly slowly when you’re trying to get your overtired baby to sleep, when you’re attempting to soothe a grumpy toddler or when you are waiting for an errant teenager to return to the familial fold (past curfew!).

We crawl into bed with relief at the end of a day full of interruptions and irritations, a day that seemed to last a century; yet perusing old photos of our kids brings tears to our eyes, a longing for those same days and wondering where the years went.

When we look back in remembrance, the months have flown and the minutes turned into years. Our non-sleeping infant is walking, our toddler is off to high school and our teenager is now married.

Our lovely Regional Victorian club manager, Sally-Anne Symes, recently shared these great pics with us of a family hiking trip in the Grampians National Park in Victoria during the April holidays and the images really made us think about what it takes to raise a global citizen.

Helping the world communicate by sharing our love of languages and playing our part in raising children to succeed and make a positive contribution to the world is central to the Fun Languages’ mission. And it’s an ideaology that is embraced by all our club managers and teachers across Australia and New Zealand.

As we see it, raising a responsible global citizen is as much about nurturing a respect and love for our natural world as it is about giving children the tool of languages to be able to communicate with people from other cultures.

For the first time in the history of the human race, all four corners of the world are being brought into ever closer contact, with increasing integration arising from the interchange of world views and cultures.

And although it’s necessary for us, as adults, to constantly adapt to this new culturally and economically globalised environment, it is our children who will most need the adaptable qualities of temperament and mind that are necessary to handle the challenges that arise from our increasingly “small world”.

Thinking and teaching with a global perspective provides an opportunity to introduce children to world issues and concepts that help them to understand that the planet and its occupants are interconnected, interdependent and fragile!

For non-native French speakers, these phrases are sure to elicit a giggle when taken out of context.

Although the literal meaning points one way, the contextual meaning points another. While the phrases are readily accepted by native French speakers, learners of French, translating with a dictionary, will no doubt get a lot of laughs out of these expressions.

1. Ah, la vache! (lit: oh, the cow!): “oh my goodness!”
2. à l’eau de rose (lit: with rose water): sentimental/soppy
3. à toutes les sauces (lit: with all the sauces): in all sorts of ways
4. au poil (lit: to a hair): perfect; flawless
5. avoir le gueule de bois (lit: to have a wooden face): to have a hangover
6. avoir le bourdon (lit: to have the bumblebee): to feel down/have the blues
7. avoir le cafard (lit: to have the cockroach): be down in the dumps; have the blues
8. avoir le démon de midi (lit: to have the midday demon): to have a midlife crisis
9. avoir un chat dans la gorge (lit: to have a cat in your throat): to have a frog in your throat
10. avoir une faim de loup (to have the hunger of a wolf): to be ravenous/starving hungry