Talk to the Snail Read online

  Well-known examples have included the ridiculous attempt in the 1980s to get French business-school tutors to use mercatique instead of marketing, the partially successful campaign to impose baladeur instead of Walkman, and the ridiculously literal gomme à mâcher that failed to replace chewing gum (or ‘shwing-gom’, as the French pronounce it).

  The English-haters have recently tried to get the French to write courriels instead of emails, and when that didn’t work, in a fit of desperation they gallicized the spelling of ‘mail’ to mel. To no avail – the French usually talk about sending each other un mail.

  The tragedy for the immortels is that the French – like everyone else – only use dictionaries to look up words they don’t understand, and they understand the anglicisms because they hear them all the time. So banning them from the dictionary makes no difference at all.24

  Ordinary French mortals love using – and abusing – English words. To be trendy, they’ll talk about mon boyfriend and they’ll say that something classy is trop style (pronouncing ‘style’ à l’anglaise – ‘tro stile’). Sometimes they get English words totally wrong. For example, instead of saying something is hip, they say it’s hype (to rhyme with ‘stripe’). And they abbreviate bon weekend (have a good weekend) to the absurd misnomer bon week.

  They also invent their own English words that aren’t English at all. Everyone knows about le camping (campsite), le parking (car park), le living (living room), le shampooing (shampoo – pronounced ‘shom-pwang’) and le footing (an old word for jogging). And for the last few years they’ve been using le fooding when they talk about going to hype restaurants. Le fooding? It’s enough to put you off your dinner.

  But all this linguistic frolicking is a leisure pursuit. Deliberately using English words is fun because they know it’s naughty. They’re kicking against l’establishment. When it comes down to the serious matter of writing French, most people are sticklers for getting things right. Grammatical mistakes on the page are not style at all.

  These Boots Were Made for Talking

  It would be a grave mistake to underestimate the importance of grammar. Grammar, along with spelling, can be simply right or wrong, so it is incredibly important to the French. Spelling is an integral part of French grammar because the verbs are so difficult to conjugate, and because lots of grammatically different words sound alike. Four verb endings –ai, –ais, –ait and –aient all sound exactly the same. And the practically indistinguishable verre (glass), vers (verse or towards), ver (worm), and vert (green) give French kids nightmares. Or their teachers, 25 anyway.

  The French are proud that their grammar is so complicated that even they don’t understand it. Just ask a group of three well-educated French people to translate the phrase ‘I love the shoes you gave me.’ If they don’t think too hard, at least one of them will make a grammatical mistake when writing out the sentence in French. If they do think about it, they’ll be able to argue for hours and will end up digging around for the grammar book they had at school and have never thrown away so that they can prove their point.26 And if you know the rules and can get sentences like this right, or even if you simply realize that there is a difficulty here and can take part in the discussion, they’ll love you.

  But back to the shoes.

  The two main contenders for grammatical rightness will be: ‘J’adore les chaussures que tu m’as offert’ and ‘J’adore les chaussures que tu m’as offertes.’ But someone is bound to ask who’s speaking here, and suggest that if it’s a woman maybe it should be: ‘J’adore les chaussures que tu m’as offerte.’

  So which is correct? It’s ‘J’adore les chaussures que tu m’as offertes.’

  If you really want to know why, by all means read the next paragraph, but be warned that it is complicated to the point of pointlessness. If you’re not a grammar fetishist, I’d strongly advise moving on to the next section now.

  Here goes: ‘J’adore les chaussures que tu m’as offertes’ is correct because the past participle of the verb offrir (offert) is governed by the que which refers to the chaussures which are a direct object of the verb offrir and are feminine plural, so that offert needs the feminine ‘e’ and the plural ‘s’.

  You see, it’s simple when you know how.

  It’s even simpler to say just ‘J’adore ces chaussures.’

  Who Are Vous?

  The eternal problem – tu or vous? Tutoyer or vouvoyer, as they call it. Other languages have these familiar and unfamiliar forms, but in France people still use them as weapons.

  Jean Cocteau summed up the snobbery that can be involved in making the wrong choice: ‘I’m always prepared to call someone tu, as long as they don’t call me tu in return,’ he wrote in his diary. You almost wonder whether he called his diary tu or vous.

  Tu is usually reserved for friends, lovers, family, animals, machines and anyone a French person considers inferior to themselves (which can cover a lot of people). During the riots of 2005, the Minister of the Interior criticized 27 his police for calling all their suspects tu.

  In the French translation of the Bible, everyone calls each other tu. Jesus and the disciples all tutoyer each other, as you would expect amongst a group of male friends. And God calls everyone tu, which is also pretty predictable given that He is superior to everyone else in creation.28 It would be fun for someone to go through the Bible retranslating the dialogues into French, and deciding who really ought to show more respect and use vous. (Fun, in the totally neurotic, anally retentive sense of the word, that is.)

  Getting your tu and vous right, though, is vital these days. Misusing tu can cause real offence, just as if someone said ‘Hey, babe’ to the Queen. I once saw the mayor of a large French town almost faint when a gauche foreign student at a city hall cocktail party asked him, ‘Tu es qui, toi?’ The student was merely asking the mayor in learner’s French who he was, but ended up giving him a diplomatic kick in the testicles.

  The student didn’t realize what he was doing, but when tu is misused by a French person who understands fully what’s going on, it can make you cringe. I have seen awkward interviews where a TV presenter gets too familiar, addresses a star as tu and receives a withering vous in reply. Because of this danger, even a none-too-chic teenage boy will address a girl in the street as vous before strategically changing to tu if his chat-up lines go down well. TV panellists often address each other as vous on air, even though you know full well that they will be saying tu before and after the show. The vouvoiement gives the programme an air of polite stylishness.

  In pretty well all workplaces, colleagues of equal rank call each other tu, but in a group conversation with their bosses, the intermingling of tu and vous can be dizzying. Even if you call your head of department or MD tu, your colleague who doesn’t work with him or her as frequently might say vous. The boss might call everyone tu in a spirit of democracy, while simultaneously calling his secretary vous out of respect for a young subordinate. But while he calls his secretary vous during office hours, you know it’s tu in private. Oh oui.

  Lovers will almost always call each other tu, of course. They are on pretty familiar terms, after all. Though there is a class of bourgeois French couple that insists on calling each other vous. Whether they get an extra thrill by changing to tu in moments of great excitement is their own business.

  Family gatherings can be just as complicated as company meetings. Most families call each other tu, from toddler to grandparent. Only a few bourgeois parents insist on vous from their children. However, even in the most laidback and welcoming of families, some people won’t dare call their mothers- and fathers-in-law tu.

  This whole problem can drive you crazy. Therefore, when in doubt, it is best to take the social weight off your feet by letting the French person decide. This can require a bit of linguistic dodging about. When you meet someone and you’re not sure what to call them (or you might not remember whether you’re on tutoyer terms, which is even more awkward), you have to act fast. Th
e thing to do is get in with a ‘Ça va?’ before they can, because the required reply is ‘Oui, et toi/vous?’ If you get beaten to the draw, you can stay neutral by replying, ‘Oui, très bien, merci, et ça va, le travail?’ (‘How are things at work?’) Other possibilities would be ‘Ça va, la famille?’ (How’s the family?), ‘C’était bien, les vacances?’ (‘How were your holidays?’) or whatever you can think of asking them about without having to use tu or vous.

  If you are really stuck, it is perfectly OK to say ‘Oui, très bien merci, et vous?’ and add ‘Ou est-ce qu’on se dit tu?’ – ‘Or should we call each other tu?’ The matter of how to address each other is an existential problem and is therefore a perfectly good subject for conversation.

  Of course, if they reply ‘Non, on se dit vous,’ you’re in the merde.

  When Are You an Idiot?

  That question, ‘Est-ce qu’on se dit tu?’, contains a potentially lethal trap in the obstacle course of French pronunciation. The extremely common construction qu’on is pronounced the same way as one of the worst insults in French, con.29 Originally a slang word for the female genitalia, it is now used to mean ‘bloody stupid’ or ‘bloody idiot’.

  The French are fairly lax about swearing, but even they can find it disturbing to insult people in the middle of half their sentences. This is why, in written and formal spoken French, people often change qu’on into the completely artificial que l’on.

  The difficult French sound ‘on’ is said by pouting the lips and snorting the syllable through your nose. It is not to be confused with the very similar ‘en’, and ‘an’, which are more like an English ‘on’. The danger comes if you mispronounce a word like quand (when) and end up saying con. This is especially tricky because it is not always obvious in a French tone of voice whether you’re asking a question or making a statement. French questions don’t go up at the end like English ones.

  This combination of misunderstandings happened to an English friend of mine, who blew his chance of getting invited to a wedding on the Côte d’Azur in one short phone call. ‘I’m getting married,’ his French sort-of-friend told him. ‘Oh yes, when?’ the Brit wanted to inquire. Unfortunately, what he actually said was ‘Ah oui? C’est con’ – ‘Oh yes? That’s bloody stupid.’

  French is full of traps like this, especially if you’re a foreigner and can’t master the subtle differences between certain vowel sounds. One of the most difficult words to say in French is surtout, meaning ‘especially’, because it contains all three of the toughest sounds to pronounce. The short ‘u’, the long ‘ou’ and the guttural ‘r’. Get them wrong and you can be in trouble.

  For example, mispronounce merci beaucoup (‘thanks very much’) and you end up saying merci beau cul, or ‘thanks, beautiful arse’. A mistake that can make you some interesting new acquaintances.

  Similarly, a friend told me about a British accountant who came over from London head office to talk to her French colleagues and wanted to ask them about their high costs (coûts) but actually asked a meeting full of salesmen ‘Why do you have such large arses?’ (culs).

  I once tried to inform a female colleague over the phone that I was just on my way to see her – en route – and later realized that I’d explained I was hurrying over en rut or ‘on heat’, like a rutting stag. When I walked into her office I wondered why she was holding her ruler baseball-bat-style. And if, like many Brits, you fail to pronounce your French ‘r’ gutturally enough at the end of coeur, you can make cri de coeur – a cry from the heart – sound exactly like cri de queue, a rather more vulgar cry from the prick. Although for French men that can often be more or less the same thing.

  Another trap is the word plein or full. If you’ve had enough to eat, you can’t say ‘Je suis plein’ – you must say ‘J’ai assez mangé’ (I’ve eaten enough). An English woman friend of mine once announced loudly at dinner ‘Je suis pleine,’ and when everyone had stopped laughing, they explained that, basically, she was saying ‘I am a pregnant cow.’

  Sometimes it’s really not the foreigners’ fault, though. You have to be a pretty good linguist, for example, to know that it is OK to talk about the noun un baiser, a kiss, but that the same word as a verb means ‘to screw’. You go out on a date, someone asks you how it went, you reply gallantly that you only kissed, and you end up bragging about getting laid. Suitors in Corsica get shot for less.

  The French love playing around with these ambiguities. They adore the fact that the French word for the group of plants that includes melons, marrows and courgettes is cucurbitacée. The only reason they know the name of this group of plants is that it sounds as if they are saying ‘cul-cul-bite-assez’ or ‘arse-arse-dick-enough’, a kind of linguistic orgy.

  Another good double entendre is the French word suspect (the suspect in a crime), pronounced ‘soos-pay’, which could be misheard as suce-pet (‘fart-sucker’, presumably an old French rural trade). There is a saying ‘Il vaut mieux être suspect que lèche-cul’ – I’d prefer to be a fart-sucker than an arse-licker. Yes, a typically meaningless French pun, but it shows how much they enjoy naughty pronunciation exercises. And discussing bodily functions.

  Get Your Bouche Round This

  A short guide to pronouncing those difficult French sounds:

  • The open ‘ou’, as in bouche or beaucoup: imagine you are a chimpanzee with an unpeeled banana between your lips. Hold your mouth in that position and say ‘oo’. Note: you don’t have to scratch your armpits as you do this.

  • The closed ‘u’, as in rue: imagine you are holding a cheap French cigarette between your lips. Push your top lip out until the cigarette is pointing vertically downwards and the tobacco is falling out of the end. Say ‘oo’. It should sound almost like a short ‘i’ sound, as in ‘hit’. It might help to get the pronunciation right if you squint as though the evil-smelling smoke is getting in your eyes.

  • The ‘an’ and ‘en’ sounds, as in quand: imagine you have just been told the price of the café au lait you ordered on the Champs Elysées. Your jaw hangs open. You grunt in pain. Say the English word ‘on’ in this position, without pronouncing the ‘n’.

  • The ‘on’ sound, as in bon: you go to kiss a French man or woman on the lips, but you’re afraid that tongues might get involved and you don’t want that (yet). So you purse your lips but keep them firm. Again, say the English word ‘on’ in this position, without pronouncing the ‘n’.

  • The guttural ‘r’, as in Sacrrrré Coeurrr: imagine you are outside a French boulangerie, drooling at a superb fresh raspberry tart. Your mouth is suddenly full of saliva, and fortunately you are alone in the street so it is safe to spit in the gutter. Hawk it all up. As the saliva gathers underneath your tongue, you are saying the French ‘r’. If you can hawk loudly enough, you are ready to become a French folk singer.

  22 What annoyed Chirac more was that the subject of the debate was French protectionism. With sublime French irony, diplomats later explained the walkout by saying that the president and his ministers all needed a toilet break. This was probably a French in-joke – their favourite phrase for ‘you’re annoying me’ is tu me fais chier or ‘you make me shit’.

  23 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French was the international language of diplomacy, a period during which all the major European powers were almost constantly at war.

  24 In fact, new words, many of them of English origin, are added to each year’s new edition of the Petit Larousse dictionary. But this is mainly to infuriate the Académie and use the resulting media coverage to sell more books.

  25 The same goes for the identically pronounced vin (wine), vain (vain), vingt (twenty) and vint (came), and saut (jump), seau (bucket), sot (idiot) and sceau (wax seal), to give just two common examples.

  26 In France, you can’t throw away your school grammar book. It would be like taking the airbag out of your steering wheel. You never know when it might save your life.

  27 He was slower to reprimand some
of them for arresting anyone with dark skin, but racial prejudice amongst the massively White-dominated French police seemed to be less important than the tu/vous protocol.

  28 That, incidentally, is why the commandments in this book are in the tu form. The originals were dictated to Moses by God, and passed on by Jesus, who addresses everyone, including Pontius Pilate, as if they were his friends and equals.

  29 For more on this and other swearwords, see the Tenth Commandment on politeness.

  The nominees for last year's Most Imaginative

  French Book Cover award.

  THE

  6TH

  COMMANDMENT

  Tu Ne Chanteras Pas

  THOU SHALT NOT SING

  (in tune, anyway)

  THOU SHALT NOT SING

  (in tune, anyway)

  I HAVE TO START OUT BY STRESSING THAT I AM A HUGE FAN of (in no particular order) Matisse, Zola, Serge Gainsbourg, Ravel, Debussy, Les Rita Mitsouko, Flaubert, Juliette Binoche, Balzac, Django Reinhardt, Camus, Céline and old Jean Gabin movies. Comedy is my first love in culture, and I’ve enjoyed many a giggle at Voltaire, Boris Vian, the stand-up comedian Coluche, and joyful, unpretentious films like La Cage aux Folles, Jour de Fête, Les Valseuses, La Belle Américaine, Papy Fait de la Résistance, and Le Grand Blond avec une Chaussure Noire.

  But all that is in the past, which is where French culture is stranded. It has been squatted by the middle-aged Paris Establishment that is scared to death of anything truly new and innovative because that would undermine the whole edifice.

  These days, the most important ingredient in French culture is the navel. Artists, writers, singers and film directors spend their whole time gazing at it. Writers write books about being writers, directors make films about their latest failed love affair, singers listen to themselves moaning clever puns over non-existent tunes. They’re all inside the Establishment and they have forgotten what life is like – or even that there is a life – outside. There is even a word for this in French – nombrilisme. ‘Navelism’ is so entrenched that it is an ‘ism’.