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Soccer

BUTCHERING THE LANGUAGE

By HELENE ELLIOTT

France Football has been amused by the American players’ mangling of the French language.

“Despite incessant efforts to communicate in French, the American players are encountering some difficulty,” it said. “The midfielder Brian Maisonneuve explained his absence from the World Cup qualifying games as a ‘jarret’ fatigue!”

A “jarret,” according to the Larousse French-English/English-French dictionary, is the back of the knee--or in culinary terms, a knuckle of veal.

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Helene Elliott

Helene Elliott was with the Los Angeles Times’ Sports department from 1989 to 2024, first as a staff writer and then, starting in 2006, as a columnist. She became the first female journalist to be honored with a plaque in the Hall of Fame of a major professional sport as the 2005 winner of the Hockey Hall of Fame’s Elmer Ferguson Award, awarded to writers “who have brought honor to journalism and to hockey.” A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., and graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, she has covered 18 Olympics.

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