BRITAIN: Put on all your woollies and have a nice cup of tea. Or move to France.
20 Because they never are.
21 This is known as the carte vitale, or lifesaving card, showing how central the health service is in the national psyche.
JACQUES: ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?’
LIZ: ‘One is not amused.’
Monsieur Chirac’s refusal to speak English earns him a right royal brush-off.
THE
5TH
COMMANDMENT
Tu Parleras Français
THOU SHALT SPEAK FRENCH
THOU SHALT SPEAK FRENCH
PRESIDENT JACQUES CHIRAC RECENTLY MADE A POINT OF disrupting a European Union summit because the proceedings were being held in English rather than French. What annoyed him was that the man making the speech was French – Ernest-Antoine Seillière, the leader of the European business lobby UNICE. When Chirac interrupted to ask why he wasn’t speaking in French, Seillière replied, ‘Because the language of business is English.’ This was one truth too far, and the president 22 and three of his ministers stormed out.
Yes, French bitterness about the way some of their inventions are ignored is very similar to the feeling they have that the planet has been robbed of its rightful world language – French. France still thinks that the world would be a much more diplomatic place if debates at the EU and the UN were held in French. They forget that ambassadors would spend all their time nitpicking about subjunctive verb forms, and countries would get invaded because no one could agree on the 23 adjectival endings in the peace accord.
And this is not the only reason why having French as a world language would be totally unbearable. The other is a political gaffe that the French can’t help committing. How can they expect other countries to use French as a national language when they mercilessly take the pee out of anyone that tries? The French make jokes about the accents of French-speaking Belgians, Swiss, Canadians, Tahitians, New Caledonians, Caribbean Islanders and Africans. French TV often subtitles anyone with a non-standard accent, as if their way of speaking is so yokelish that no civilized viewer will understand.
All this goes to explain a certain ambiguity that some French people feel when a foreigner tries to speak the language. They are happy that someone has been (temporarily, at least) converted to the belief that French must be spoken. And they are glad that they can be superior to you, because they know when you make a mistake.
However, they do feel genuine pleasure when you get French right. I started to get invited on to French radio and TV a lot as soon as producers found out that I could speak good French. Their reasoning was obvious. It doesn’t make good listening if a guest is jabbering incomprehensibly (except on certain reality TV shows, of course). But I only started getting invited back on to the same shows when they realized that I could actually make jokes without getting the grammar wrong. That was très raffiné.
Which reminds me – there’s a French joke that is funny only because the grammar in the punchline is correct. Just so you get it, let me explain in advance that the penultimate word, ‘fût’, is the imperfect subjunctive of the verb ‘to be’ (the imperfect subjunctive being a rarely used and rather pompous tense).
Here’s the joke, in English first for those who don’t speak good enough French to enjoy the full impact of an imperfect subjunctive:
A Frenchman is talking to a Scot.
‘Have you ever tried haggis?’ the Scot asks.
‘Yes,’ the Frenchman replies.
‘What did you think?’ the Scot asks.
‘At first I thought it was shit. Then I regretted that it wasn’t.’
The punchline in French goes like this:
‘D’abord j’ai cru que c’était de la merde. Ensuite, j’ai regretté que ça n’en fût pas.’
Hilarious, right?
Yes, hilariously right.
Parlez-vous Right?
Worse than the fact that few nations in the world can be bothered to argue about sanctions and wars in French is the deep-seated fear that their language is being killed off by English. This idea is, of course, totally ridiculous. Even French teenagers who listen to radio ads exhorting them to go ‘on line et chat avec tes friends’ are incapable of stringing an English sentence together. And when they go on line, they use a uniquely French chat-speak in which ‘qu’est-ce que tu fais’ becomes ‘kes tu fé’.
What the French-language protectionists are scared of is exactly what is annoying grammarians and historians of every language in the world – the language is alive and changing, and there’s nothing the grammar control freaks can do about it.
But the French, more than most other people, still love centralized control of every aspect of life. Which is why the protectionists are so adamant that the French language must not change unless they say so. Each new word admitted into the language does not officially exist until it has been vetted and okayed by the Académie Française and its team of forty modestly named immortels. And whereas English-dictionary compilers happily list any foreign word they pick up, from coulis to karaoke via fromage frais, the immortels usually try to veto foreign expressions and impose French words in their place.
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
