Two years ago, during my junior year of college, I spent a semester living in Paris. During this time, I often babysat for a two-year-old American girl named Madeleine. Madeleine and her parents were in Paris for the first of a two-year stay related to her father's work; I inherited the job from a girl who attended the same study-abroad program the semester before I did.
I have yet to encounter any buttons (or other types of fasteners for that matter, including snaps and toggles) who could take Madeleine in the "cute" department: blond curls, blue eyes, etc. I soon took to calling her "la petite Madeleine" behind her back to my francophone friends.
Madeleine often seemed lonely to me -- she hadn't yet mastered French and was only starting to make friends at her preschool. She was a fan of the dramatic reenactment, and whenever we played with her dolls they did the same thing: took a train from Berkeley, California (where she was from) to Paris with all of their friends and all of their belongings. I hesitate to weigh in on exactly what this behavior meant, but I'm sure it was something big.
In any case, what I remember Madeleine most fondly for is using the word "what" in place of the relative pronoun "that," a usage that has made it into dictionary.com but is listed as "nonstandard." "What" can replace "that which" as in "What I would like is a grilled cheese sandwich" or "whatever thing that" as in "What happens at camp, stays at camp" but when it stands in for a lonely "that" it sounds almost woefully adorable: "The horsey I want is the horsey what's missing!" Madeleine would lament, or, "My favorite dress is the one what's yellow," or, "The song what you sang to me wasn't long enough." Although the idea of Madeleine herself, dunked in tea or otherwise, isn't particularly evocative, the phrase is one I've been trying to incorporate into my vocabulary ever since.
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