Meanderings through the dictionary

At right: Bonnie, Trev and I prepare to brave the Breton winds and visit La Roche-Bernard. Note my toboggan....

"No translation of an event, concept, or experience from one language to another can be made without distortion. It matters not how quickly the translation occurs or how dedicated and skilled the translator is. There are no absolutely accurate translations, and no absolutely identical meanings given to words of different languages."
from Resurrection: myth or reality? by John Shelby Spong

I'm (this is Emily, by the way) reading an odd combination of things just at the moment: the above mentioned book, subtitled 'A Bishop's Search for the Origins of Christianity'; the second collected volume of the graphic novel The Ultimates, recommended to me by my spouse, who usually guesses right about what I'll enjoy reading; and Wonderful Brittany, a book (in English!) about the chunk of land we now live on that a thoughtful friend found for us. Along, of course, with near-daily dips into the Bird Guide to Europe and the French-French dictionary that I finally broke down and bought myself before Christmas. It makes for a pleasant hodge-podge of ideas in which to marinate my brain.
Looking up something in the French dictionary can often lead to an Internet-like linking experience: I look up a word, find that the definition holds a word I don't know and can't guess from context, so I look up that word, and so on, until I have entirely lost sight of the original question and have to go back to whatever I was reading to find where I started. In one of these perambulations I found myself at the top of the page in the 'Ts' reading 'toast' (as in English, something one either eats or drinks, depending on the occasion), 'toasteur/toaster' (also as in English, the apparatus for turning one's bread into charcoal), and 'toboggan', which diverges from the English definition by being not the thing on which one slides down the hill, but instead the track on which one puts the thing that slides. Either that, or an apparatus for conveying items from one level to another. I stopped at that point, puzzled, and have not yet checked this with an actual French speaker (the average person tends to get a slightly wild-eyed look when accosted by a total stranger asking odd questions about random French words).
The word 'toboggan' in English has a fond, if muddled, association for me; it gained a new aspect not long after I married Trever, when, on a cold and wintry day, he asked me where his toboggan was before we set out on a walk. "Where's your what?" I confusedly replied, thinking that he had taken leave of his senses, as there was no snow on the ground. Until then, for me the word had been either a noun denoting a sort of sled, or a verb denoting the action that took place on that sled, as in 'tobogganing down a hill' (and landing in a bush, because there was no way to steer the darned thing). Either way, that clearly had not been what Trev meant, but after some discussion I learned that a toboggan was a knit cap, and we turned out the closet shelf together to save his ears from freezing. Sadly, that hat evidently didn't make it to France, as you can tell from the photo above, where I am the one wearing the fuzzy green hat and Trev's ears are forlornly unprotected.
Obviously, our life in France is often lived 'in translation' so when I read the above quotation it struck me rather more forcibly than it might otherwise have done. My French is in a worse state than usual thanks to having spent the last several weeks speaking English almost exclusively, but even when I'm in my top form I wonder about whether I'm choosing the best words to convey what I want to say. But of course, I wonder this in English was well, and reading Bishop Spong's quote threw me back to a conversation my father and I had about 25 years ago. I have no idea now how we got started, but it was a discussion of communication (I am the child of two sociologists, and I think the habit of inquiry is communicable, no pun intended). In the course of the conversation, we decided that all communication between human beings is of necessity a translation, even if they speak the same language, because the words spoken/written by one must be heard/read and understood by the other. And there is no guarantee that what is meant will be what is understood. This was a rather startling idea to me and one that has stuck with me over the years. Sometimes I wonder if I should bother to work on my French! But if I'm daunted one day, I'm sure that the next will find me digging through the dictionary again on the track of some word that has inspired me.....