Provenance and effervescent

My brother is two years younger than me and, for as long as I can remember, he's been smarter than me. Which, now, is really cool. But when you're little, it's kind of embarrassing.

Recently my brother used the word "provenance" in reference to my grandfather's organ that he was helping me move into our new house. I have no idea what he's talking about. "Don't you watch the 'Antiques Roadshow'?" he asks. Well, I do sometimes, but I somehow tend to tune out words that I don't know the meaning of. So then my brother decides to help me improve my vocabulary by encouraging me to use the word in conversation to help me remember. Seein's how it sounds so French, and I'm all about learning French, you would think that I could remember this word. But I don't. I have a really hard time remembering the word whenever I find some opportunity to use it in a sentence. And I see the word all the time now, so I don't know how I missed it before. As an example, here is an article on Wikipedia about a really interesting painting by Jan van Eyck, and the article has a section on Provenance.

And for our other French word of the day, we're going to learn the word effervescent.

When I was in the hospital, and sick from the pain medication, I asked them to take me off the IV and bring me pills for pain instead. This, of course, was not an easy conversation for me to have in French. But that night, the nurse brings me a pill in a foil wrapper, and when I open it, the thing is the size of a 2 euro coin, which makes it bigger than a quarter and smaller than those old 50 cent pieces that I used to see sometimes with Eisenhower on them. I can hardly swallow a regular-sized aspirin, so how am I going to swallow this? I can the nurse back and ask her if I can bite the pill, and I make biting motions with my mouth. "No, no, no -- effervescent."

I look on the package that was there in my lap, and sure enough, written plain as day, is the word effervescent. I should have tried to read the instructions. I shouldn't have assumed that I wouldn't understand the French written there. The nurse asks if I understand effervescent. I tell her that I understand, and I put the pill in my cup of water to prove it to her. She asks me what the word is in English, and I tell her a bold-face lie, "Je ne sais pas" --- I don't know.

Sometimes I have serious doubts about my ability to learn French when I have so much trouble with the English.

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