I recently came across Geoffrey Pullum’s “The Miserable French Language and Its Inadequacies” and enjoyed it immensely. It points out things that immediately disturb one when one begins learning French but which one is afraid to point out lest one be thought an ignorant philistine.
This is a language used by people who are supposed to be the big experts in love and kissing and sexy weekends of ooh-la-la, and they don’t have words for “boy”, “girl”, “warm”, “love”, “kiss”, or “weekend”.Still, they seem to get along okay.
A friend of mine just came back from Paris and brought me a copy of L’Express, complete with a separate “Styles” section. Writers on fashion and the arts tend to be frequently allusive, liberal with jargon and wordplay, and it was interesting to see this manifested in French. Words that were apparently English poked up everywhere in the most baffling contexts. Apparently a “checking” is a cash register, a “self” is a cafeteria, “hype” means fashionable, and “look” appears in multiple contexts, such as in the phrase “total look” (whatever that means) and, most ridiculously, fitted with French verb and adjective endings: “relooker” and “lookées.”
Out of 50 restaurants featured under “Restaurants aussi beaux que bons,” fully one-quarter of them have English or part-English names: Eatme, Caviar House & Prunier, Sensing, Tokyo Eat, Mood, Cristal Room Baccarat, Black Calvados, Rich, Ze Kitchen Galerie, No Escape, Gold, Canteen, and Noodles.
One of the most amusing activities I did when I taught English in France was to give the students lists of French words used in English and teach them how to pronounce them and what they meant. It was a hoot.
Anyway, all this makes me rethink the Académie Française. Perhaps it is better for them to stick with pure French after all, to save their dignity.
