Years ago, in my first year at university studying French and Italian, we had some set texts. One of them was Paul Éluard. I had no patience for surrealist poetry then - and not much now - and one of my most hated lines was “La terre est bleue comme une orange,” or “The earth is blue like an orange.” Obviously. At the time, being young and feisty, I wrote a fake surrealist poem in French and stuck it on my door. It wasn't brilliant and certainly not as good an effort as making up a whole tribe for IV Upper R.E. class and getting an A for it. But it fooled most of my fellow students and proved my deeply sophisticated critical point that the earth is blue like an orange is, well, daft.
And then, just now, I was reading through the documents in my FRANCE research folder and found a report entitled “The microbiological risks and work in wastewater treatment plants,” by some serious researchers at the serious sounding Institut National de Recherche et de Sécurité, and they began their serious techno-medical report with this:
Which translates, I think, as: “Blue like an orange,” as one says of the earth, a vivid expression that still applies, when we all know that water is the substance the most widespread across the globe.
More or less. Anyway that's not the point. The point is that some boffins began a serious and probably boring (I haven't read it yet; I got distracted) report with a quote from a surrealist poet. Brilliant. Sometimes, I really, really thank god for the French. I even like Éluard better.