Day 84 (Wednesday)

Spent a lovely day pottering and reading in the sun, it’s my first full day off in what seem ages and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Today’s ‘French lesson’ from Stephen Clarke’s Talk to the Snail (Ten Commandments for Understanding the French) to give it its full title is:

Who are vous?

The eternal problem – tu or vous? Tutoyer or vouvoer, 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.’

Tu is reserved for friends, lovers, family, animals, machines and anyone a French person considers inferior to themselves (which can cover a lot of people).

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 in creation. The original commandments were dictated to Moses by god and passed on to Jesus, who addresses everyone, including Pontius Pilate, as if they were his friends and equals.

Getting your tu or 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 as qui, toi?’ The student was merely asking the mayor in his learner’s French who he was, but ended up giving him a diplomatic kick in the testicles. The student didn’t realise 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 address a girl in a street vous before strategically changing to tu if his chat-up lines go down well. Family gatherings can be complicated. Most families call each other tu from toddler to grandparent. Only a few bourgeois parents insist on vous from their children. However, even in the most laid back and welcoming families, some people won’t dare to call their mothers and fathers-in-law tu.

This whole problem can drive you crazy. Therefore, when in doubt, it is best to take the social weight off your feet by letting the French person decide. This can require a bit of linguistic dodging about. When you meet someone and you’re not sure what to call them (or you might not remember whether you are on tutoyer terms, which is even more awkward) you have to act fast. The thing to do is get in with a ‘ca va?’ before they can because the required reply is ‘oui, et tu/vous?’ If you get beaten to the draw, you can stay neutral by replying, ‘oui tres bien merci, et ca va le travail?’ (yes very well thank you, how are things at work?) Other possibilities would be ‘ca va, le famille? (How’s the family?) or whatever you can think of without having to use tu or vous. If you are really stuck, it is perfectly OK to say ‘oui, tres bien merci, et vous?’ and add ‘ou est-ce qu’on se dit tu?’ Or should we call each other tu? The matter of how to address each other is an existential problem and is therefore a perfectly good subject for conversation. Of course, if they reply ‘non, on se dit vous,’ your left in the merde.  

When are you an Idiot?

That question ‘ou est-ce qu’on se dit tu?’ contains a potentially lethal trap in the obstacle course of French pronunciation. The extremely common construction qu’on is pronounced the same way as one of the worse insults in French con (see day 80).

Clarke goes on to say that an English friend of his fell into this particular trap during a phone call…

… [the friend] blew his chance of getting invited to a wedding on the Cote d’Azur in one short phone call. ‘I’m getting married,’ his sort-of-friend told him. ‘Oh yes, when?” the Brit wanted to enquire. Unfortunately what he actually said was ‘Ah oui? C’est con’ – ‘That’s bloody stupid.’

He goes on to provide a few more examples of mispronunciation clangers such as…

…[if you] mispronounce merci beaucoup (thanks very much) and you end up saying merci beau cul, or ‘thanks beautiful arse. Similarly a friend told me (this is Clarke speaking, not me) about a British accountant who came over from London head office to talk to her French colleagues and wanted to ask them about their high costs (couts) but actually asked a meeting full of salesmen ‘Why do you have such large arses?’ (culs)

I once tried to inform a female colleague over the phone that I was just on my way to see her – en route – and later realised that I’d explained I was hurrying over en rut or ‘on heat’, like a rutting stag. When I walked into her office I wondered why she was holding her ruler baseball-bat-style. And if, like many Brits, you fail to pronounce your French ‘r’ gutturally enough at the end of coeur, you can make cri de coeur – a cry from the heart – sound exactly like cri de queue, a rather more vulgar cry from the prick. Although for Frenchmen that can often be more or less the same thing.

Another trap is the word plein or full. If you’ve had enough to eat, you can’t say ‘je suis plein’ – you must say ‘j’ai assez mange’ (I’ve eaten enough). An English woman friend of mine once announced loudly at dinner ‘je suis pleine,’ and when everyone had stopped laughing, they explained that, basically she was saying ‘I am a pregnant cow.’

…the French love playing around with the ambiguities. They adore the fact that the French word for the group of plants that includes melons, marrows and courgettes is cucurbitacee. 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 etre suspect que leche-cul’ – I’d prefer to be a fart-sucker than an arse-licker. Yes a typical meaningless French pun, but it shows how much they enjoy naughty pronunciation exercises and discussing bodily functions.