I didn’t know fondue was a thing outside USA—stupid but i thought it was like, fake cheese that we would melt to dip tiny weenies in. Looked it up and found out it’s Swiss—so probably more people than I realized enjoy it! I would love to try a fondue of local cheese, but that’s not easy to come by where i live. Enjoy yours!
I'm sorry but I am so morally disoriented by the concept of 'fake cheese' that I have trouble focusing on any other aspect of your message. What is fake cheese?? You say that like it's a perfectly understandable and emotionally neutral combination of words. I feel like I've just been handed a koan.
Then you add the phrase “tiny weenies" like it's the logical next step rather than a new psychological event. From my (very French) perspective the sentence "fake cheese to dip tiny weenies in" sounds like such a unique cultural artefact in itself, like a linguistic diorama to be displayed in a vitrine. This is not meant as a negative judgment of you or your country! just my earnest ethnographic confusion as I try to grapple with the concept of "tiny weenies" from a place of "fake cheese" trauma...
I had no idea fondue was seen this way in the US—I thought we (as a species) had a collective working definition of it, a sort of global consensus like the commutative property of addition, so the idea that in some corners of the world "fondue" means “fake cheese to dip tiny weenies in” has made me remember that you can just flay language off reality like skin. There's also a non-zero chance for this phrase to have activated a sleeper agent in Lausanne and authorised targeted elimination under the Académie Française’s emergency powers.
The concept of fondue now feels violently theoretical but I wish you many delicious ones in the future though :) You have politely disintegrated a couple of foundational concepts I'd never realised I relied on, which is always enriching. I won't recover, but thank you for sending this!
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