Lillian here, delighted to host our Monday Quadrille prompt.

My husband and I recently took back-to-back cruises that had us visiting cities in China, South Korea and Japan. We always try to learn, at the very least, how to say hello and thank you in our host country’s language – which we did. Many of our tour guides also taught us phrases in their language. These mini-language lessons for our travels always bring to mind my high school French lessons. I can still say Please pass the butter; please pass the pencil, where is the library and sing the first verse of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in French…which I think is pretty amazing since I only took three years of French from 1962 to 1965! But alas, I’ve only been to Paris once. However, I’m happy to report we never lacked for butter on our croissants and we did find our way to a library!

I was thinking about languages the other day when I discovered an interesting article on line. It was about the 70^th anniversary of the British Council. They promote the learning of English around the world. To mark their anniversary, they commissioned a survey to identify the 70 most beautiful words in the English language. Now understand, English is not considered a romance language! None-the-less, the survey was given to 40,000+ people in 102 non-English speaking countries, although many of the folks understood the language. Do note, we don’t know which facet of “beautiful” each person identified with when taking the survey – IE the meaning of the word, the sound of the word, the look of the word????? In any case, the 10^th most beautiful word in the English language was identified as tranquility. So – that’s the word for today’s Quadrille. You must include the word tranquility, or a form of the word, in a poem of exactly 44 words, sans title.

And if you want to see the entire list of the 70 most beautiful words, go to https://curiosity.com/topics/this-is-the-most-beautiful-word-in-the-english-language-curiosity/

Looking forward to reading your posts! As always, please do observe the “rules of conduct” for dVerse – and for those of you new to dVerse, here’s what we hope everyone does:

• Write a poem, as the prompt suggests, and post it to your blog.
• Click on Mr. Linky below to add your name and enter the direct URL to your poem
• On your blog, please provide a link back to dVerse: perhaps a statement at the end of the poem indicating this prompt and linking to dVerse. Others us dVerse as a tag as well. This enables more folks to view our prompts, and thus increases the readers of your poems too.
• If you promote your poem on social media, use the tag #dverse poets
• And most importantly, please do stop by to read responses to the prompt and add a short comment or reaction. Everyone likes to be appreciated! The prompt is “live” for several days – as you’ll notice by the comments you’ll receive – so do stop by several times, and read some of the latecomers too!

image from Pixabay.com