Sinister Street

Re my last post on bac, a reader very reasonably asked why I hadn't mentioned bac as the abbreviation for baccalauréat, the school leaving examination.  The answer is simple--I intended to, and then forgot! I'm glad she reminded me; I suspect it's the first association a French person makes on hearing bac without a context.

Context is usually crucial in understanding a word, but sometimes it doesn't give enough help to grasp the nuance. I've just read the lovely novel by David Foenkinos, La Délicatesse (2009). (Also a film, screenplay by Foenkinos himself and his brother Stéphane, starring Audrey Tatou). It's the first book I've read by this prolific young author (born in 1974) but it won't be the last.

I found certain key words and themes running through it, including sinistre. This didn't seem quite the same as English "sinister," but its shade of meaning wasn't clear. The heroine Nathalie congratulates, with surprise, Markus on making a joke. Markus, Swedish and phlegmatic, replies, "Thanks. Do I seem as sinistre as that?" He says in Sweden he is considered a boute-en-train (a live wire), and "being sinistre is a calling" there. Another character, Charles, thinks he hasn't made the women in his life laugh enough, and wonders, as his wife hasn't laughed for two years, three months and seventeen days, if he has the power to turn women sinistres. Markus and Charles have a dinner which seems to Markus the most sinistre of his life; Charles, disappointed in love, feels oppressed, feels his life is sinistre. 

I should mention that the book contains joy and optimism as well as sadness. But as these examples suggest, and as the Robert & Collins dictionary confirms, sinistre means "gloomy," "lugubrious;" sometimes "miserable" or "creepy"--c'est vraiment sinistre ici.  It can also mean grim--une sinistre réalité. It does sometimes mean, as in English, "ominous," "of ill omen;" the dictionary adds a special note explaining that this is the only sense in which it translates English "sinister."

In the historical dictionary, Alain Rey says that since the nineteenth century sinistre is often used in a weakened sense to mean "sad" or "boring"--as in La Délicatesse. This weakening is reflected in slang usage: une réunion sinistre, a deadly boring meaning; un sinistre imbécile, an absolute imbecile, with sinistre an intensifier, much as we say "he's an awful idiot."  It's the weakening of sinistre that makes it hard to understand for an English reader, since "sinister"is still strong,  as "awful" used to be.

As in English, the origin is ultimately Latin "sinister," meaning "left" as in "left-hand," "left side." The Romans originally thought the left-hand side was lucky, but then switched to agree with the Greeks that left is bad. This idea has permeated folk-lore and superstition ever since.

I'm Bac!

Though by now you have probably, and understandably, gone away. However, it's just about spring, time for this space to re-flower, after a pause that turned into an unintentional winter hiatus.

Bac means a bin; it's used for the open bins in which records--now CDs or DVDs--are displayed and sold, for rubbish bins, for recycling bins on which one sees written Ce bac est réservé pour le tri, and for various other sorts of containers and tubs, such as a vegetable bin in a fridge--bac à légumes--or the tub of a sink--évier à deux bacs, for example.

It also means "boat," especially a flat ferry-boat type of vessel, but I haven't yet come across this in context. Here on Lyon's rivers we have barges or péniches.

Somehow I thought bac was a modern word, but it has ancient origins. From vulgar Latin baccu or baccos, recipient, it seems to have originally been a Gallic word for "boat," and it has a Breton cognate, bag, plural bigi, boat/s.  Over the centuries it expanded from "boat" to other kinds of containers.

I started wondering whether our modern English "bag" comes from an ancient British cognate of the Breton bag. A bag is also a kind of container, after all. But not so, according to the OED. The early Middle English word bagge "possibly" came from Old Norse baggi. There was also Old French bague and Provençal bagua, "baggage," and medieval Latin baga,"chest" or "sack."  But it's not clear where any of these came from, nor their relationship to each other, and there seems to be no connection with the Breton bag at all.

More etymological mystery. But back to bac and ce bac est réservé pour le tri: le tri is a short form of triage so of course means "sorting," used particularly of sorting rubbish for recycling. In my building there is a rubbish room with grey bacs for rubbish and green ones for recyclables. This not-so-fragrant locale poubelles--first mentioned here last February, a year ago, heavens!--is used by the restaurant and shoe shop workers as well as by other flat-dwellers, and so there's rubbish of all sorts. Cardboard boxes and bits of card from inside boots seem to be thrown willy-nilly into the bacs pour le tri and it's not clear whether you are meant to separate paper from plastic from cardboard or whether it's Ok for it to just all go in pell-mell. As it does.

Glass, however, must be taken to special big oval containers--not bacs but silos, I learn from the city's website--on the streets. You push your bottles and jars piece by piece through a rubber-edged hole in the container's side; each one makes a satisfying crash on impact. This process takes quite a long time when performed by bleary-eyed young men emptying bags full of bottles the morning after the night before.

Mince!*

Sapristi!** How sadly neglected, this space.

The new Tintin film is here and several companies have appropriated the film's language to advertise toys and other merchandise on posters around town. Spielberg's film is in English, so Hergé's French has been transmogrified once more into the "Blistering barnacles!" and other vivid expressions that we've known since the first Tintin translations, comic books, and TV shows. Anyway, the film is great fun.

The expressions used by Tintin, Captain Haddock et al are not typically used in France, of course, but it's been a delight to discover that others one has read in books are still employed in everyday life.

For example, I've been so pleased to find that people do really say Oh-la-la! I've heard it in a variety of situations, once by an elegant elderly lady when nearly pushed off the pavement by a skateboarding youth, and just yesterday by a waitress at a café when I asked her what kinds of tea she had--she wasn't a regular waitress and was just lending a hand, so the question flummoxed her--Oh-la-la, tea? I haven't the faintest idea, I'll have to ask the owner.

People also still say dis donc! or dites donc!  --literally "say then" and meaning "fancy that!" or "goodness me!" or "you don't say!" One hears it on the street quite often as people talk to each other. I haven't yet heard sacrebleu! or zut! to name a couple of expressions I learnt years ago. Well, perhaps even then sacrebleu! was old-fashioned, because now it's marked in Robert & Collins as archaic; zut is not thus designated, however, so should still be in use--I'll keep my ears open.

What one does hear a lot is merde and many variations thereof, as well as chier, to crap, and expressions using it such as ça me fait chier! "It pisses me off!" or, "It's a pain in the arse!" And I am sure there are many other vulgar expressions I'm simply not recognizing, because they are used much more now than when I was in France at sixteen and seventeen.

Exclamations, expressions, and swear words represent one of the greatest difficulties for a foreign speaker of any language: one doesn't know exactly how they sound and feel to the natives. One doesn't have an accurate sense for what linguists call their "register," which is why Robert & Collins kindly append one asterisk for "informal language," two for "very informal language," and three for "offensive language."

For example, the word foutre always confuses me, because I thought it was the same as "f**k," but it turns out that's not really the case. In some usages--for example, je suis foutu, "I'm screwed," it has pretty much lost its sexual connotations and is far milder than "the f word."  (On the other hand, it must be admitted that my own sense of register for "the f word" is probably very much out of date; it still has shock value for me and still seems very strong, but it's used so often by so many people these days that I suspect its register has shifted.) But I'm afraid to use foutre because I'm just not sure enough about how it sounds.

Then baiser, which means "to kiss" and is still used thus, also has a sexual meaning--three asterisks in Robert & Collins--translated by "to screw, to f**k, to lay." So I am terrified of using it is its first sense.

Ciel! Mais c'est difficile, le français! And how I love it.


* Not chopped beef, but an exclamation--Drat! Darn it! or sometimes, Wow!
**Good heavens!

Coqueluche

I'm teaching English to a few private students here in Lyon, and the other day one of them was talking about a persistent cough she had; perhaps it was la coqueluche. This was a new word for me, but after another student explained it was a childhood disease featuring a cough, I guessed it meant "whooping cough," and the dictionary confirmed this. What an interesting word! And one that didn't seem to have any relation to its meaning.

After the lesson, I turned, of course, to the Dictionnaire Historique (where, as in Robert & Collins, coqueluche follows right after coquelicot, "poppy," a word which enchanted me when I first learned it sometime in my youth), and learned that M. Rey doesn't know the etymology of coqueluche and nor does anyone else.

It used to mean a sort of capuchon, or pointed monk's hood. It may have a connection with coque (shell of a fruit or an egg) or coquille (mollusc in its shell), but if so it's by means of what M. Rey calls un processus inexpliqué.


Equally unexplained is the word's change of meaning from the monk's hood to the disease.  Perhaps because the disease affected the whole head like a hood, or because sick people wrapped themselves up in hooded cloaks, or because they felt hot with fever, as if wearing a hooded cloak. No-one knows, but folk etymology took over, as people began calling the kind of cough typical of this disease chant du coq (which makes sense because of the way the cough sounds) although the word coqueluche has nothing to do with the bird coq.

From 1625 a metaphorical meaning developed; to be the coqueluche of a person or family means to be the spoilt darling, the one everyone makes a fuss over. In this expression, says Rey, coqueluche still carries the meaning of capuchon, a hood or head covering. A similar metaphor is at work with, for example, toque, a cap or hat, and être toqué de quelq'un meaning to be infatuated with them.

Well, the etymology is obscure, but I can still enjoy the sound of coqueluche--of the word, that is; the sound of the disease is another matter, and a worrying one to epidemiologists, because there's been a recent rise in whooping cough cases and deaths in places, like the US, where previously everyone was vaccinated against it.

Coquelicot, coqueluche, coquilles saint Jacques, coquillage, coquetier, coquinerie....on just one page of the dictionary, so much verbal delight! The words are delicious in the mouth, crunchy, almost croquant. Which leads me to a French tour de force to finish up with, both verbal and culinary: croquembouche, a pyramind of cream-filled choux pastry balls.

Bon appetit!

Back for the "Rentrée"

I was in a restaurant recently where the dish of the day was described as being "à l'ardoise." What's this? I wondered. Some region of France I hadn't heard of, with an interesting cuisine?

The waitress waved towards the specials board and said, "That's the ardoise, it's written there."

Having grasped that the ardoise was the name for the day's specials board itself, I was further enlightened a few days later when, in old Lyon, I saw a shop selling nothing but flat black slabs cut in various cutesy silhouettes like cats and pigs. These were ardoises, and they could be written on like a blackboard, as the shop-owners had done to simultaneously demonstrate their use and to proclaim the superiority of the product. Restaurants often do write their specials on just this sort of black slate.

For of course it turns out that ardoise means "slate." One says un toit d'ardoises for "slate roof;" or, figuratively, J'ai une ardoise chez l'épicier, I have a slate, an unpaid debt, at the grocer's. The colour ardoise is slate grey. And just last night, reading the new book by Didier Ducoin, Une anglaise à bicyclette, I came across bleu ardoisé, "blue tending to slate," for the skirt of Emily, l'anglaise in question, who isn't really anglaise at all. (Also used without an accent, bleu ardoise, slate blue.)

I'd already decided to write about this word, with its shades of "ardent" and "arduous" and its echo of French regions like the Ardennes and the Ardèche, when I found that it merits quite an extensive entry in Rey's Dictionnaire Historique de la Langue Française. And I learned that my misunderstanding of ardoise for a region wasn't so far off the mark after all.

Ardoise probably comes from a Gallic root "ard" meaning "high," as in Ardennes, originally Gallic Arduenna. I haven't been able to verify whether the same root is in Ardèche, a river name as well as a regional name; but the river carves through mountainous gorges. I was just in this spectacular part of France, so I can testify its landscape is one of towering heights.

In the past here, as elsewhere, schoolchildren wrote on slate; shopkeepers used slates to keep track of customers' credit, which led to the more recent use of ardoise for "cost" as in l'ardoise sociale.

I beg forgiveness for neglecting this blog, and I hope--as befits the rentrée, time of back to school,  fresh beginnings, and cooler September air--to start again with a clean slate.

walk at your own risk

In the last post I mentioned surprising areas in which French punctiliousness is absent. The one that immediately springs to mind--and to sight, and all too often to shoe-sole--is the attitude towards cleaning up after your dog. Which is, ce n'est pas nécessaire.  

Actually, although I've put this attitude in French, I simply cannot begin to understand it. Of course, some dog-owners do clean up after their chiens, I have seen them doing so--one or two. But judging from the appalling condition of the pavements, they are in a small minority. In a country that prides itself on appearances and presentation--and where the wearing of elegant shoes is de rigeur!-- this filthiness in the streets of otherwise beautiful towns and cities is extraordinary.

Many other writers have talked about this, most famously perhaps Stephen Clarke (A Year in the Merde) in his inimitably funny and acerbic way.  I cannot attempt to say anything new or better or funnier or more bitter, but I add my own lament to all the others. And I realise I'm breaking my own rule of shaping a post around a French word or phrase...this one is based on a French phenomenon.

One of the English-language French newspapers recently had an article about this ghastly mess, from which it's clear the phenomenon is not restricted to Lyon (or Paris, where Clarke lives and writes). The article explained that there are special pavement-cleaning machines to deal with this problem, and cited the number of tons of dog waste removed from France's pavements yearly--my numerical blind spot prevents my recalling the figure, but, believe me, it was staggering. And it's true that the urban clean-up crews are very efficient here, just as public transport is, and most other public services; every morning, the streets and pavements are clean, ready to be soiled all over again.

I live on a pedestrianized shopping street down which it should be an unmitigated pleasure to promenade. I'm not far from the cobbled, narrow lanes of Vieux Lyon, also traffic-free, where again one should be able to walk with a liberated and relaxed stride. Instead of which, one has to keep one's eyes vigilantly upon the ground ahead to avoid stepping into disaster.

Que faire? Do I dare accost every dog-owner I see leaving behind his pet's souvenirs? Strangely enough, one rarely sees it actually happening; but if I did, is my French good enough, am I confident enough, to say anything? And what kind of difference would it make, in the grand scheme of things?

We noticed that the little villages around Lake Como in Italy had scrupulously clean pavements and frequently-posted signs enjoining dog owners to be responsible about this. While we were sitting on a bench looking out over the lake one evening, a young boy with a puppy who had taken him by surprise came up to ask if we had any tissues. Young as he was, he knew he had to clean up after the dog. If only this understanding could be imported to all dog-owners in France.

the cheese man knows his onions

I live very close to Monoprix--a shop selling clothes, housewares, and food at reasonable but not rock-bottom prices. In the food department there is a fresh fish counter (overpowering in aroma and avoided by me), a fresh meat counter, and a counter with a wonderful array of cheeses sold by weight. (All these things are also available pre-cut and wrapped).

At this cheese counter, a sign on the wall says:
QUESTION QUALITE, NOTRE FROMAGER EST BEAUCOUP MOINS COULANT QUE SON BRIE. *   

The key word here, coulant, is of course from couler, to flow, as rivers, tears, or taps; applied to cheese, it describes that perfect soft, flowing, almost runny texture that a ripe Brie -- or local San Marcellin -- has at its heart. A coulant wine is smooth, a coulant writing style is free-flowing.

So, coulant used figuratively of a person means "easy-going" (Robert & Collins) or d'humeur accomodante (Rey's Dictionnaire Historique).  I found no other translation offered in either book. And here is where it becomes interesting: easy-going and of accommodating temperament would seem to be positive attributes. But in the Monoprix sign,  the boast is that the cheeseman himself is NOT coulant  (while his Brie should be, and is). Coulant-ness in him would be a negative trait.

At first I thought the sign referred only to the person (often a woman) working at the counter selling the cheese, but as I write it comes to me that it might refer just as much to the cheese buyer, the person who selects the cheese for the shop and supervises its quality. And of course, when it comes to quality, especially of food, one should never be easy-going in France.

With regard to the cheese he offers the customers, he should not be soppy, or wishy-washy, or "wet" as we British say (more liquid metaphors), but, instead, he must be precise, controlling, and vigilant for any defects in quality. Actually it probably applies to the seller as well -- he must not be slipshod enough to allow any inferior cheese into a customer's panier. (I rather like "slipshod" as a translation for coulant in this negative sense. Opinions welcome).


This sign pleases me very much, with its elegant play on words and its emphasis on quality. Definite opinions, clarity of thought, knowing what's what, drawing a sharp distinction between something good and something that doesn't come up to scratch--all that is highly valued in this culture. This attitude can lead to a certain inflexibility, as famously encountered in officialdom; on the other hand, it produces on-time buses and trains. In my experience, if someone says they will deliver your new washing machine between 10:00 and noon, they do.

But this punctiliousness applies most of all to food. (And is completely lacking in surprising areas--of which more anon). I wouldn't presume to analyse or define Frenchness; I can only speak out of my short experience so far. But to me this sign by the cheese counter seems quintessentially gallic-- So French.






* Literally: When it comes to quality, our cheese specialist is much less runny than his brie.