[Opinionated Blowhard]

Then again, the French say some things that sound really, really bizarre to Anglo Saxons. I had a good friend who was French and who lived in America for years, and she still made airy-fairy comments like this. I think its just them. At one point in their history, this thinking allowed Napoleon to conquer Europe . . . . .

[fhayek]

Yeah, probably. I mean you could start off postulating that thunder and rain are masculine, and that the earth and soil are feminine. I mean there is a certain logic in that. You could then formulate an entire philosophy about man, nature, agriculture around that. You could write volumes about how mother earth is abused by the rapacious vicissitudes of violent weather. You probably would even be praised by the left. But, your givens are wrong. And as such, your whole argument would be nonsense.

[Oztrich Boy]

French out of German,

British writer Sir Peter Medewar in a (fairly brutal) review of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident (though there is a great deal of it) to have contributed anything of permanent value to the storehouse of human thought. French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.