Thread by @AlexandraErin

The other day while playing on The Language Owl I learned that wi-fi in French is "le wi-fi", pronounced so that it sounds like you can't *quite* remember the name of Mario's brother, which certainly tests the "everything sounds sexier in French" hypothesis.

And I understand that if you arrange those letters in that order and follow the standard rules of French pronunciation then you wind up with those sounds. And "le wi-fi" is doubtlessly better than some twee academy phrase that people would ignore anyway.

And of course the English phrase "wi-fi" is nonsense to begin with, a rhyming pun on an unrelated technology in a different field in which the pronunciation of "fi" with a long i sound is completely arbitrary.

So the point of all this isn't that French is weird and silly, but that language is, and it tickled me.

Mario et le wi-fi.