Creole Syria and Other Mistaken Mysteries

Macaroons!

Someone recently wrote to me about Creole Syria and he sent me a link about what he was talking about.  It turns out he was confused.   Things currently or anciently in the Middle East are not my forté.  I specialize in Louisiana Creole, which means things that have happened and do happen in New Orleans.

Creole people live in the city of New Orleans and in the surrounding Louisiana civil parishes.  Creoles are people who are descended from people who came before them who lived out their Louisiana lives during the time the royal French or the royal Spanish or the imperial French governments had jurisdiction in our out-of-the way part of the world around the mouth of the mighty Mississippi River.  

What about the Cajuns?  Cajuns are descended from French Canadian settlers who relocated in Louisiana and they are different from Creoles.  The easiest way to put it is that Creoles live in the city and Cajuns live out in the swamp.  As far as I know, and I'm no expert, there is neither a Creole nor Cajun settlement in Syria, though I may be proven wrong as current events shake out in that region.

If there were a Cajun outpost in Russia, Vladimir Putin would be eating chicken gumbo while shirtless.  I guarantee he would.


Now you know what a Cajun sounds like.

If you can't understand Justin Wilson, you aren't alone.  Frau Schmitt can't figure out a thing he's saying.  He was the King of Cajun Comedy as well as a chef on public television.  My father used to love to watch his cooking show, but my father loved just about anything that reminded him of New Orleans.  The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Macaroons!!

"Macaroon" is a fun word to say, isn't it?  We get our macaroons at Sucre on Magazine Street.  We don't have them all the time, so don't expect them.  We have them when we have them, which means that we have them when one of us visits the cigar store across the street.  I'll leave it up to your imagine who that one of us might be: could it be Your Humble Narrator or might it be Frau Schmitt?  

Some people write us to ask if there are jaguars in New Orleans?  A:  Not recently.  The last sighting of a jaguar in southern Louisiana was in June of 1886 in Donaldsonville, which is about an hour's drive away. 

There was a recent sighting of a black panther in southern Louisiana in Iberia Parish.  Anything is possible in Cajun Country no matter how improbable it might seem.


Does that mean there may be black panthers in New Orleans?  It ain't necessarily so.  Certainly not the way you mean.  There are plenty of feral cats in our neighborhood, though.  They aren't around our house, but there are some blocks that are overrun with feral cats.  They help to keep the feral chicken population down.  We have feral chickens in our neighborhood, too.

The sitting room in our Les Pêches Suite

This may come as a surprise to our regular readers, but I'm not the biggest "Weird Al" Yankovic fan.  I can hear a lot of you saying, "You could knock me over with a feather," but, truly, if Weird Al releases a multimedia song parody, odds are I have no idea of what his source material might be.  That said, I got a critique from a Weird Al fan recently.  He sent me a link to a video.



"Dear Mr. King," our correspondent began, which was a very polite and proper way for him to start his correspondence.  I always enjoy being called Mr. King, as the people at the bank where I do my banking (where else would I do it?) well know.  It is one your humble narrator's names, after all.  Wanna know another one?  Another one is, Cutie-Scootie.  You can call me Matthew, which is my first name and it's the name that most people use.  (If you are reading this at the bank, you can keep calling me Mr. King.)

Our correspondent continued, "You may not realize it but your grammar is sometimes less-than-perfect.  You use Oxford commas capriciously and you sometimes omit or include possessive apostrophes without rhyme or reason.  While I am sure your sentence structure, which is usually immaculate and readable, is intended to reflect the way by which you intend to be heard in your readers' heads, your dangling participles leave much to be desired.  Your use of colloquialisms and gerunds sometimes muddies your message."  Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera....and so on.  The letter went on and on until I nodded off and dreamed I was in New Orleans.  Then I woke up and my dream had come true.

Thanks, Buster.  I'll take your critique under advisement.  Remember, though, I'm living in New Orleans and I've picked up the local lingo and en-FLEX-zee-ohn.  If you want to know what it's like to live in this magical city, you'll stay at La Belle Esplanade.  Mispronounce everything and everyone will know what you're talking about.  Living la vida local is what it's all about in our part of New Orleans.  It's nothing like this:


You won't find (m)any shopping malls in New Orleans.  You have to go to the suburbs for that.  When a brass band plays in New Orleans, people dance like nobody is watching.  If I commit any word crimes, please remember, I live in New Orleans, a Creole city.   I'm not a native.  I'm a convert.  There are worse crimes of mistaken identity that a person can commit.

We hope to meet you soon.

À votre santé,
La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast.