Don’t be fooled by a double-barrelled name, though. In France, they’re rarely chic unless they have at least three barrels. Two-part surnames are usually just a symptom of present-day political correctness, with married women keeping their own surname and tacking their husband’s on the end. Coupled with the French love of double-barrelled first names, this can produce ridiculously long email addresses. In my old company, where emails were all on the model firstname.secondname@company and there were lots of feminist women, the firm’s email list was peppered with addresses like mariebernadette. villepin-dechirac@multiword-company-name. fr. By the time you’d written half the address, you’d give up and phone instead.
Merde is Everywhere
When they’re not being excessively polite, the French can be astonishingly obscene.
It can take a while to get used to the way that French swearwords crop up everywhere in the media, at all times of day, as if they weren’t rude at all. Like women’s breasts, swearwords are considered to be perfectly natural parts of human life.
I recently heard a French ‘comedian’ (I use quote marks because the term is often rather approximate) do a sketch on a mainstream breakfast-time radio show about how a politician had been looking more cheerful recently. Not because of an economic upturn or improved opinion-poll ratings, but because he had found a new girlfriend and enjoyed a coup de bite, a bit like saying he’d ‘got his dick wet’. The image of a politician’s private parts is not something I want to laugh at or even think about at any time of day, let alone over breakfast. (Now you see why I used the quote marks.) But on this show, his genitals were brandished about with complete disregard for decency and broadcasting standards.
The word merde hardly causes a stir anywhere, and when doing interviews about my books on French TV and radio, I’ve only ever met one person who didn’t want to say it. This was a radio interviewer whose show was also broadcast in Africa, and who was obliged, she said, to use ‘correct’ diplomatic language. ‘It’s OK for you to say it, though,’ she told me, and I did.
Despite this non-shockability, French is still a great language to swear in. Not only because the words can be so descriptive (see the small selection below), but also because they seem to be chosen out of sheer relish for the sound they make. Rather than being spat out quickly like English swearwords, they can almost be sung, so an exchange of insults can turn into a kind of operetta.
Con (‘bloody idiot’, ‘twat’ or ‘moron’) has its regular feminine form, conne, but this can be made even more insulting by adding the ‘asse’ sound, which the French find deliciously vulgar. Connasse (female idiot), and the even more pleasing pétasse (approximately: female farting idiot) are big favourites.
Other insults that can be elongated in the mouth and therefore enjoyed to the full include a male adaptation of con – connard, which allows the French person to prolong the vulgar-sounding growl at the end of the word – ‘konn-AAAAARRR’.
Then there is ‘enculé’ (often pronounced ‘on-koo-LAAAAY’), a word that suggests you are an idiot because you have allowed yourself at some point in your life to be sodomized. Not everyone would take that as an insult, of course.
Porn to be Wild
The French are as open about porn as they are about using pornographic words. One of the five main terrestrial TV channels, Canal +, offers its subscribers hardcore porn after midnight. And the channel has only just introduced a parental key-in code and a completely blank screen before you key it in – until very recently, the porn was simply scrambled, which did little to hide what was going on during certain close-ups. Or so I’m told, anyway.
This porn is produced by French film-makers (although the actresses are often imports from the East, where girls will apparently do a lot more for less money), so the channel presumably gets grants from the government for showing home-grown culture rather than Anglo-Saxon sex. Before the film, the channel shows a ‘news’ programme in which they review new movies and show a ‘making of’, which is exactly like a porn film except that there is a man with a video camera in shot, and you see the girls wipe themselves with facial tissues at the end of a scene. Or so I’m told.
Softer porn, meanwhile, is everywhere. It is perfectly acceptable for a prime-time family film to show bare breasts, buttocks and people bouncing on beds. Janet Jackson’s nipple would not have caused a ripple in France. Sophie Marceau did the same thing at the Cannes Film Festival, and no one in France suggested banning live TV broadcasts. Besides, the French see much more overt stuff on advertising billboards and news-stands. French porn magazines regularly do poster campaigns, so that a newsagent’s window looks like an advertising campaign for sex. A pouting woman, who clearly can’t wait to pull the photographer’s trousers off with her teeth, points her breasts at passers-by of all ages, her splayed crotch hidden only by a headline like ‘I Want More Sex’. Not that I’ve looked that closely myself.
Anyway, all this flesh and sexuality is
