Your computer!

[Reliant121]

That says it all doesn't it.

[Sionnach Glic]

Damn French, bringing their culture all over the place....

[Captain Picard's Hair]

Damn French, bringing their culture all over the place....

To wit, we now, writing in English, are using a lexicon of chiefly French origins.

[Mikey]

Mmm, I'd say our vocabulary owes as much to Teutonic/Gothic/Aryan languages as to Romance languages.

[Captain Picard's Hair]

Wikipedia (yes, Wikipedia, but it does cite sources here and is the quickest way to go) says this:

One of the consequences of the French influence is that the vocabulary of English is, to a certain extent, divided between those words which are Germanic (mostly West Germanic, with a smaller influence from the North Germanic branch) and those which are "Latinate" (Latin-derived, either directly or from Norman French or other Romance languages).

Numerous sets of statistics have been proposed to demonstrate the origins of English vocabulary. None, as of yet, is considered definitive by most linguists.

A computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd ed.) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff (1973)[40] that estimated the origin of English words as follows:
Influences in English vocabulary
Influences in English vocabulary

* Langue d'oïl, including French and Old Norman: 28.3%
* Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
* Other Germanic languages (including words directly inherited from Old English): 25%
* Greek: 5.32%
* No etymology given: 4.03%
* Derived from proper names: 3.28%
* All other languages contributed less than 1%

A survey by Joseph M. Williams in Origins of the English Language of 10,000 words taken from several thousand business letters gave this set of statistics:[41]

* French (langue d'oïl): 41%
* "Native" English: 33%
* Latin: 15%
* Danish: 2%
* Dutch: 1%
* Other: 10%

However, 83% of the 1,000 most-common, and all of the 100 most-common English words are Germanic.[42]

The bolded part could explain much of the perceptual difference.

[Mikey]

Well, there we have it. We do owe our non-inflected and backwards (from most of the rest of the world) grammar to the Aryan group, though.

[mwhittington]

Let me tell you sopmething about Louisiana. On Bourbon Street, anyway, between the standard partying (and legal drinking) hours of 7 am and 6 am (that's no typo) there are an awful lot of people talking to G-d one way or another, but precious little churchin'.

Yay, Mardi Gras! The only party in the U.S. where it's okay for the girls to go topless in public! On day three, you step in vomit puddles!

[Mark]

I've got to get there one year.

[mwhittington]

Think of it as Rio's Carnival meets a monster frat party!

[Tsukiyumi]

What are "places I'd avoid like the plague", Alex?

[Captain Picard's Hair]

What are "places I'd avoid like the plague", Alex?

Anyplace that appears on Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs" on Discovery.

[Grundig]

Yay, Mardi Gras! ... On day three, you step in vomit puddles!

Then

I've got to get there one year.

Do you have a fetish we don't know about? Don't answer that.

[Mikey]

Yay, Mardi Gras!

Actually, I was there in June and it was still like that.

On hour three, you step in vomit puddles!

Fixed.

Honestly, the place is something to behold. Our first night there, a wedding parade was strolling the street - brass band and all - and my wife and I just sort of joined in, danced and marched, and were handed numerous drinks. After a getting a bit ferschnickered, I attempted to leave a bar one night with half of a bottle of beer in my hand when I was stopped by the bouncer - his only comment was that glass bottles aren't allowed on the street, so he gave me a plastic cup to take the rest of my beer with me. The bars are closed between the hours of 6 am and 7 am ONLY. In fact, there are bars which front the sidewalk primarily for "to go" business. Walk down Bourbon Street at night and almost every club or bar has live jazz, or blues, or zydeco, or rock, or is an actual club running deep house and jungle. And believe me, that sort of atmosphere gets its hooks in you.

Plus the food... absolutely incredible. And excellent museums, the Audubon Zoo, cemetary tours, bayou tours, the voudun shops, paddle-wheel riverboat cruises, Cafe du Monde for chicory-laced coffee (excellent) and beignets in the afternoon (after shots for lunch, of course...) Yeah, I liked that town.

And for the complete drunken flesh-pressing CF that Bourbon Street becomes at night, the NOPD mounted police keep things right - pick-pocketing is surprisingly limited, and drunken violence is nipped sharply in the bud. I only saw one instance of a guy beginning to flex his booze muscles; he started to get into shouting matches with various passersby, was told by a mounted cop to tone it down, began to go after someone with his hands raised, and was driven into a garage door by the chest of the horse. To the drunken throng's great credit, the officer and the horse were unanimously appauded.

*EDIT* I failed to mention the body shots that waitresses were selling me, then my wife(!) or the fact that somehow got to the airport on time, checked in, and only then noticed the bumper sticker on my wife's rump.

[Grundig]

Then it's settled. When we all meet, this is where it's gotta be!

Easy for me to say, it's just a few hours flight from California.

That does sound incredible! I think I'll try to take my girl there, see if we can get in the spirit of things together. I'm a bit worried about her getting taken advantage of/fondled, etc. How did your wife fare, Mikey?

[Mikey]

Well. Like I said, I was pleasantly and greatly surprised by how well-behaved a drunken mass of flesh could be. Of course there were general cat-calls and drunken idiots, but no real groping or anything like that. She was asked to show the twins once or twice, but when she declined it wasn't pursued.

This was all the year before Katrina. The French Quarter was little affected byt the flooding, but I can't really say what the law enforcement situation is since.