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
