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
