Paris at a Certain Age

Extreme Onctuosité

I love the notion of faux amis (false friends) in the French language. Beware this label warns us; these words seem perfectly fine but they can turn on you and get you into trouble. Today’s word embodies this sense of deception.

Polly Vous Francaise’s recent post on the word onctueux zinged me with recognition and resonance. (note: I had the opportunity to meet Polly Lyman and hear her read at an American Women’s Group in Paris coffee gathering). In October I spotted an onctuosité % on my yoghurt container and was so struck that I saved the carton.

Onctuosity percentile? Shouldn’t that be a number reserved for politicians, sleazy ex-boyfriends and used car salesmen instead of yoghurt?

Then the term ‘Extreme Unction’ burbled out of my memory bank (which is usually overdrawn and hard to make a withdrawal from thanks to menopausal gridlock). What does the sacrament of the last rites have in common with yoghurt? In Extreme Unction, a priest anoints the dying person with holy oil. That’s it! The oil. Danone (Dannon in France) probably doesn’t want to advertise how oily its yoghurt is, so the percentile must represent the percent of fat, the creaminess quotient.

I’ve never seen onctueux/onctueuse listed among the usual faux amis, but it should be. In the United States, unctuous means Eddie Haskell: two-faced, fawning and flattering towards certain people, but sneaky, untrustworthy and dishonest behind their backs.

Beware the Seven Unctuous Knaves: Sleazy, Slimy, Sneaky, Slippery, Creepy, Cagey and Greasy.

Now Accepting Nomininations for Extreme Onctuosity:
1. Dick Cheney
2. Donald Trump
3. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
4. your nomination here

A Pregnant Blister

New French Word: Cloque
The metros of Paris are currently plastered with advertisements for this movie.

The term 'en cloque' was unfamiliar to me. But once I saw the companion poster I knew exactly which American movie it was.

It turns out 'cloque' means 'blister' and being 'en cloque' is an familiar (but not vulgar) way of saying someone is pregnant.

Falling in Love

The linguist Steve Kaufmann says that you have to be in love to learn a language well. Maybe that's why I've never learned Spanish, despite living in California where the language is omnipresent. I'm 'just not that into you', Mister Spanish Language. But French, oh that's a different story, a love story.

Sometimes it feels I'm in love with an entity who is out of my reach, like falling for a movie star. But I have the obsession that makes you think about it all the time, trying to tease out its secrets, boring other people with some new facet you've noticed, and wanting to be with it night and day. I want to inhale it, chew it, absorb it through my skin, soak it in, bathe my eyes and ears with it and live on it.

The airplane ride over to Paris was like foreplay. It began with hearing boarding announcements in French, then the flight attendants instructions in French and then fellow passengers chatting in French.

But being in love doesn't make you any smarter. I can memorize like a demon, but the accent is so-o-o hard for me. I think I have to develop a more physical relationship with Mr. French and wrap my lips around him more deeply. I have to work my orbicularis orus, depressor labii oris and levator labii muscles into a frenzy or just watch Mickelino's how to pout and make French sounds video over and over again.

Say: Oui-sti-ti!

Thanks to Kristin Espinasse’s blog, I was able to call out, “Ouistiti!” (pronounced wee-stee-tee) instead of “Say Cheese!” when taking pictures of these charming French-American siblings, Morgan and Steven. According to Kristin, this is the traditional pre-photo command in France. Your lips assume a semi-smile when saying the “wee” in ouistiti. A ouistiti is some type of South American lemur or monkey.


When visiting the Tour Eiffel with Steven and his entourage of grown-ups, I was surprised to see this sign on the first platform:
On January 15, Illustration magazine reported: “…the experiment of a young building painter, Mr. Paul Cans, who concocted an ingenious device to move up and down a smooth rope as easily and safely as one would on a staircase. Going by the name of “ouistiti”, the apparatus is a pocket staircase; the inventor demonstrated its advantages by hoisting himself up to the first platform of the Eiffel Tower (187 feet) with the greatest of ease in just a few minutes.”
(Click on the photo of the sign to better see the rope ‘staircase’.)

A quick net search revealed a device called a Petzl Ouistiti as the only current remnant of the Tour Eiffel ouistiti variant. It’s a climbing harness for 4 to 9 year old children, designed to buckle at the rear, so only adults can unlock them. Do you think 4-year-old toddlers really go rock climbing? Or is this just a cover name for a harness that parents at their wit’s ends can use to leash up unruly children? Is it so named because of its Tour Eiffel ‘pocket staircase’ precursor or because kids climb around like little lemurs? Inquiring minds want to know.

Brain Fart or French Fart?

Postmenopausal language learning presents unique challenges. When a French vocabulary word refuses my summons, is it the typical brain fart of aging or a question of lousy memorization? The feeling is similar. If you’re over 45, you know what I mean: suddenly you can’t remember why you entered a room or the name of a neighbor. My friend Roger aptly characterized mid-life memory deficits when he said, “You just don’t have same day delivery anymore.” It’s true: if I pause and relax, the word eventually floats onto my tongue. But if I haven’t properly learned the given vocabulary, no waiting period will produce it. And if I don’t immediately look it up or write it down, I’ll forget the issue only to repeat the entire process the next time I encounter the word. That’s the dilemma. Brain Farts require patience. French Farts require action.

Another issue is that my French reading comprehension is far superior to my elementary listening abilities and laughable speech fluency. Some days trying to chat in French causes actual brain pain, as if I can feel neurons stretching and straining to make new connections. Fortunately it only hurts in one of my speech centers.

Location…Location…Location

Language is all about the left brain. There is a special area for speech comprehension: Wernicke’s Area. If you stroke out and damage Wernicke’s, you can still form words, clear and fluent words, long strings of words, but they don’t make any sense. That’s why they call Wernicke speech ‘coctail hour conversation’ or ‘word salad’. It’s a jabberwocky jumble of meaningless words. You don’t comprehend speech and what you produce is not true language.

It’s Broca’s Area that’s giving me grief. Broca grabs the right word and puts it in the right place to create a coherent sentence. If you blow out Broca’s Area, you understand language, know what you want to say, but you can’t get it out your mouth. And if you do manage a few words, they are telegraphic, slow and labored, and often only a noun and verb without any use of tense. And wouldn’t you know it – it was named after a French doctor, Paul Broca.

The reason it’s harder to learn a second language as an adult is that you have to build a separate spot in Broca’s Area for it. When you learn another language as a child, you use the same region as your native tongue. No wonder it hurts; I’m building a French Annex in my brain.

Bilingual folks have beefed up speech centers. Yep, their brains are actually denser. The more fluent they are, the more grey matter they have in their speech areas. And the earlier they learn their second language, the denser the grey matter. The good news is that learning a second language helps ward off senile dementia. I wonder how you say “No Code” in French?

L’esprit d’escalier

Supposedly the English language contains more vocabulary words than does the French language (400,000 vs 200,000). Despite this, it can be difficult to find just the right phrase in English for a situation while the French nail it with a zinger, le mot juste.

Case in point: L’esprit d’escalier (staircase wit or ‘afterwit’)
This refers to the clever phrase or comeback that only occurs to you on the stairs after you’ve left the provocative encounter.

It’s such a universal plight that there’s even a l’esprit d’escalier website devoted to capturing the rejoinders you should have made.

Oh, how I wish I had l’esprit présent, the ready wit that flashes, entertains and skewers. Instead I’m a lifer in the coulda/woulda/shoulda club.

Harcelling

This week I discovered a new (to me) French word in a news report - harceler. (Big surprise. Most French paragraphs I read contain words that are new to me.) I like the notion of this word and the way it combines the sound and sense of 'hassle' and 'harass'. Plus, there's an onomatapoeic ring to it (at least for English speakers). Who else but an 'arse would harceler someone?

Then yesterday I read Petite Anglaise's blog entry Bully and discovered the concept of harcèlement moral, aka harcèlement professionnel. It appears that the French have a much broader definition of workplace harassment then we do in the US. Here we recognize that age, race and gender discrimination can create a hostile work environment, but the French recognize general persecution and denigration of an employee as discriminatory. I'm sure the Bush administration would like to outlaw even these current meager protections that US workers are afforded. Hooray for France! Down with 'arse-aling!

Pardon my French

I'm trying to learn French. The process is frustrating, amusing, fulfilling, embarassing and glacially slow. Hopefully by exercising a different part of my brain, learning a second language will help ward off Alzheimer's. Some days my speech center feels like a rusty tin can that resists opening. French words I recognize in written form refuse to be summoned for a conversation in French. Despair. Humiliation.

Other days I'm thrilled at discovering an especially fabulous new word, experiencing intense joy and renewed enthusiasm for the study of the language. For instance, recently I was discussing favorite computer fonts and looked uup the word FONT in my dico: "police de caractères". The character police...you have to love it!