• On or l’on ?
Intermediate learners of French are sometimes led to believe that it is more correct to use l’on. This is in fact never mandatory and should not be overused, but is sometimes preferable simply for euphonic reasons (the sound and rhythm of the phrase), eg: Si l’on vous disait … (to avoid the hiatus of the two vowels), or L’idée que l’on retient de… (to avoid the rather ugly ‘kon’sound in French). L’on at the beginning of a sentence is totally unnecessary and would be considered affected (in speech at any rate). • Jungle
Jungle has two accepted pronunciations: it can rhyme with épingle or with ongle (whereas jongler – juggle – can only rhyme with the latter).

• Initial ‘w’ or ‘v’?
The following are pronounced ‘v’: wagon, wisigoth. Virtually all other common French words beginning with ‘w’ (many of which are borrowed from English) are pronounced ‘w’, including water(-closet) – toilet, watt, web, whisky, white spirit…and the oh so topical Wallons – Walloons, the inhabitants of the French-speaking part of Belgium, soon to secede?

• De toutes les couleurs
We’ve seen in a previous issue that the names of colours (ie, nouns) are always masculine (un vert lumineux). As adjectives, colours agree in number and gender if used alone (tomates vertes) but are invariable when two or more of them qualify a noun: tomates rouge et vert means tomatoes which are all both red and green. However, des tomates rouges et vertes is correct when the meaning is red tomatoes and green tomatoes. For compounds, use a hyphen if both adjectives are colours (eg, vert-jaune – yellowy green) but not if one of the adjectives is not (eg: vert foncé – dark green)

• Plural “gotchas”
The plural of nouns ending in ‘al’ is ‘aux’ EXCEPT:
bals (because baux is the plural of bail – lease), festivals, navals…
The plural of nouns ending in ‘ail’ is ‘ails’ EXCEPT:
baux (see above), corail/aux
travail/aux,
vitrail/vitraux,
ail (aulx is falling out of use). The plural of nouns ending in ‘ou’ is ‘ous’ (fous etc) EXCEPT:
bijoux (jewels),
cailloux (pebbles),
choux (cabbages),
genoux (knees) …