Rue Rude

Google auto-complete judges frogs and Yankees

 

... et on les leur rend bien!

 

Americans are... stupid; cons; fat; idiots

Franglais in the South

Like most long-term expats in France, I find myself thinking partly in French. In Paris this is no problem-- most of my non-French friends are in the same boat, speak Franglais and readily understand such phrases as "I got a PV!" [pronounced Pay VAY] or "I was flashé'd on the way to the airport"! or "She had to redoubler" or  "He was the cadre in charge of ressources humaines...."  or "He's doing a stage in Bordeaux."

When I come back to the States, though, it's sometimes hard to think of the right word fast enough. My mother and sister looked at me oddly when I exclaimed, "Oh, the grass has really poussée!"

OMG she spoke English!

Walking out of the elevator at my hotel, I passed a woman who was saying into her phone, "Oh, sorry, I'll be down in a minute!"

"She's speaking English!" I thought, surprised.

Well, duh! We are in Chicago!

K1ri = Yank

How we think the French think of us

Have you ever heard the term ricain? It's French slang for "Yank." Short from américain. So yesterday I found out that k1ri is verlan for ricain!

How they actually think of us

What you can't say

We were talking about codes of behavior, and how different they are from country to country and class to class. People who aren't aware that these codes exist are at a disadvantage.

A woman I know who is a university professor here in Paris said that a couple of years ago the professors went on strike against a government plan to evaluate them by certain quantitative criteria. "They invited everyone to a grand auditorium style Louis XVI to intimidate us. Then they started haranguing us. But they didn't know there were certain things that would make the profs tense up [se crisper], that they shouldn't say. One government official made mistake of saying, 'Nous avons un deal.' At once, all the professors got up and marched out!"

Why? you may ask, if you are not aware of the profound disdain of French intellectuals, few of whom over thirty speak good English, for the English of the market, that "sabir transatlantique." "Deal" was one word too far.

"Can English still be saved?" No English-speakers featured or, presumably, wanted

The slandered pig

Overheard at the marché this morning.

Butcher: Alors, to finish up how about some côtelettes de porc?

Woman: No, thank you, I don't really like pork.

Butcher: Quoi, vous n’êtes pas très cochonne?*

*[Cochonne, or female pig, means a dirty-minded woman, while a nice ordinary sow is "une paisible truie."]

My favorite European signs

The Pschitt website (warning, has sound)

 

Fücker is a real bus company.

This one just always makes me laugh.

A major German auto magazine.

 

Wormland: big chain. Really.

Binsack: Frankfurt jeweler

Salle de fartage [wax room]

All directions!

On Untranslatable Words

There are always words that you can't seem to translate, and it tells you something about a culture to see which ones. You can eventually explain the meaning of these words, but not always their feeling.  Here are a few examples.

FRENCH doesn't have a word for:

kind    The French say "gentil," which is not at all the same; "nice" can be false, but "kind" means with a good heart.

home     "Foyer" or "maison" is somehow not homelike.

squeamish  "délicat" is not the same thing at all.

rude "mal poli" does not translate the American sense: aggressively, deliberately impolite.

gentleman   in French seems to be more of a fashion statement than a personal quality.

tailgating   -- as in a car. This is curious because almost all French drivers tailgate. Maybe it's like our not noticing gravity until Isaac Newton pointed it out.

friend     Of course, the French have friends too. But a French ami/amie always has to have a sex, whereas we find it's often so convenient not to have to say.

neighborly      Did you ever read Guy de Maupassant?

ENGLISH doesn't have a word for:

sortable      This refers to someone you are not embarrassed to take places. "Presentable" is somehow less flattering.

doux which means so many things in one word: gentle, sweet, soft.... La douce France....

encadrer    means to surround children, guests, tourists, etc. with care, education, a certain environment.

dépaysement is a wonderful word meaning that you are taken out of your own familiar world into a different one.

patronat    means collectively the Big Bosses.  It's used a lot in French newspapers. I don't think we have an equivalent in English, and that tells you something.

incontournable  It means something that you can't get around, no matter how much you might want to.

attentat     French has a useful word that means any kind of terrorist attack.

My favorite expression in French, just because of how it sounds, is tentative d'attentat  (an attempted terrorist attack).

On Patrick O'Brian and Fraudulent Identities

This year I have been reading the entire Aubrey and Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian. I had tried the first book, Master and Commander, years ago; I had been aware of the series for years. The idea of the heroic naval captain and the intellectual doctor was intriguing and the books got great reviews. But the first one was too hard to get into—I tried a few pages and then stopped. I thought maybe it was just too male for me, like Moby Dick, Thomas Pynchon (with his cartoonish characters) or John Updike. But I really enjoyed the movie when I saw it in December—although it was an strange experience to watch the Napoleonic-era English-French battle scenes in English with French subtitles, in a theater on the Champs-Elysées, and actually accompanied by a British naval captain. I was going on a long trip soon afterward and bought the first book on tape to hear as I drove. After that I was hooked on the series and was off and reading. I am just starting number 16, The Wine-Dark Sea. Yes,I love the books in spite of the many, many times I, and no doubt many other readers, have had to skip blithely over phrases like, “Double the clench-bolts” or “slung by its train-loops, side-loops, pommelion and muzzle.”  What makes them so wonderful is their acute vision and language, and the humor and humanity of the characters.

Here is an example from the first book, picked at random just now.

On his knees, and with his chin level with the top of the table, Stephen watched the male mantis step cautiously towards the female mantis. She was a fine strapping green specimen, and she stood upright on her four back legs, her front pair dangling devoutly….[The brown male] advanced lengthways….even in this strong light Stephen could see the curious inner glow of his big oval eyes. [Stephen watches the insects mate, and as they do so, the female eats the male, who continues in motion] still firmly anchored by his back legs. “There you are,” cried Jack. “I have been waiting for you this quarter of an hour.” “Oh,” said Stephen, starting up. “I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon….” he said, very gently covering the mantis and her dinner with a hollow ventilated box. “I am with you now.” “No you aren’t,” said Jack. “Not in those infamous half-boots. Why do you have them soled with lead, anyhow?” ....it was clear to Stephen that he had not spent a pleasant afternoon with the admiral; and all he said, as he changed into his shoes, was, “You do not need a head, nor even a heart, to be all a female can require.” “That reminds me,” said Jack, “have you anything that will keep my wig on? A most ridiculous thing happened as I was crossing the square: there was Dillon on the far side with a woman on his arm—Governor Wall’s sister, I believe—so I returned his salute with particular attention, do you see. I lifted my hat right off my head and the damned wig came with it. You may laugh, and it is damned amusing, of course; but I would have given a fifty-pound note not to have looked ridiculous with him there.”

A few years earlier, I had read that Patrick O’Brian, the famous Irish writer of the Aubrey and Maturin series, had turned out not to be Irish at all, but English, of partly German descent. It had puzzled me at the time. I have been in England enough to know that the Irish are not particularly admired there. By the time I had gotten through my fifth or sixth book of the series, I was quite curious about the author. Apparently many people were, because in one of the books there was a note from him, saying that as a writer, his life was irrelevant to his work, but giving a few details—how he had grown up in Ireland, in Connemara, been ill as a child, but “fortunately there was a governess, dear Miss O’Mara,” and that “although I spent long periods in England, liking the people very much…it was Ireland and France that educated and formed me, in so far as I was educated and formed.” He gave another few pages of details about his life, mostly since he had moved to France long ago, and came across as a reclusive but charming man.

Unfortunately by then I had read the damning truth on too many websites: Patrick O’Brian’s real name was Richard Russ, he was not in the least a well-connected Irishman from Ballinasloe, County Clare, but middle-class English, and he had changed his name, among other reasons, to hide the fact that he had walked out on his wife, small son, and dying baby daughter, vanishing and leaving them penniless, at the beginning of World War II. I think there is not much that can be said to redeem this bald fact. 

He was in his mid-twenties then, and later had a long, happy marriage with a much posher wife who had been Countess Tolstoy. Her grandchildren, not his own, are his legal heirs; he cut off all ties with his son (whom he had sent to school) when the young man changed his name back to Richard Russ upon marrying. The son explained why in the Guardian in November 2003:

When I was 27 and about to get married, something happened that completely changed the way I thought about my father. I had met a man at work, an ordinary Battersea guy, who had been in the army. I asked him how he could settle down in civvy street after all the excitement of war. He said he had three youngsters and that he had come home to find his wife dying of cancer. So he buttoned down and got on with it. He didn't walk away. And I thought, "Good on you. That's how a man should behave."… [My father] was a marvel at telling stories, and I have full respect for him in that way, but as a man he was not respectable.

It is hard not to keep this in mind, at least in the back of your mind, when you are reading these wonderful books. The main character in the earlier books, Jack Aubrey, is a lovable optimistic bluff sea-captain, intelligent but blunt and down-to-earth. But gradually, as I read through the series and advance in time, Jack’s friend the surgeon, Stephen Maturin, has become both more important to the plot and less lovable. Maturin is a spy as well as a surgeon and naturalist. “Now listen, Jack, will you?” he says to his closest friend in the second book, when Jack has just found him out. “I am somewhat given to lying: my occasions require it from time to time. But I do not choose to have any man alive tell me of it.”

In the book I have just finished, Clarissa Oakes (called The Truelove in America), Stephen Maturin is speaking to the young woman of the title, a runaway convict who has her own dark secrets.

From some context he could not recall Stephen had mentioned his dislike of being questioned: “Question and answer is not a civilized form of conversation.” “Oh how I agree,” she cried. “A convict is no doubt more sensitive on the point but quite apart from that I always used to find that perpetual inquisition quite odious: even casual acquaintances expect you to account for yourself.” “It is extremely ill-bred, extremely usual, and extremely difficult to turn aside gracefully or indeed without offence.” Stephen spoke with more than common feeling, for since he was an intelligence-agent even quite idle questions, either answered or evaded, might start a mortal train of suspicion.

N’est-ce pas?