Zoo

I recently read somewhere about a book full of bloggers' excuses for having neglected their blogs, called Sorry I Haven't Posted or something like that. So obviously I am not alone. And I do have the excuse that I was away in the States for a while. But. I must get back into the swing of it!

Well, I began today in a fog, because of having been woken up in the night by a relentless automatically- repeated wrong number on one of our American cell phones. I was due to go to Villefranche-sûr-Saône, the town north of Lyon where my French teacher Bernard is based. He has been driving into Lyon for our lessons, because the back problems I had when we began meant I couldn't travel easily. Today, at last, I was determined to go there, so he didn't have to deal with the drive and the traffic. But I failed to get out of the house quite soon enough, and missed the train by two minutes.

When I called to tell him this, I said "J'ai perdu le train," which of course isn't correct French; to "lose" the train is an Italian locution. He, like the good teacher he is, corrected me: "J'ai raté le train."

I already knew (though forgot to use) this verb rater, to mess something up, bungle, fail (an exam, for example), as well as to miss a train, bus, boat or similar. What I didn't know, until I looked it up just now in my beloved Dictionnaire Historique de la langue française, is that it seems to be actually based, in a roundabout way, on rat (n.m.), the animal "rat."

In the mid-1600s an expression emerged, prendre un rat, "to take a rat," used for when a gun failed to fire properly. This apparently came via old French raster or rater, to gnaw like a rat, which described the noise of the hammer scraping against the plate without drawing a spark. (And the hammer, from its bent shape, is called chien de fusil, "dog of the gun," just to increase the zoological confusion. If a person is lying chien de fusil, it means "curled up.")  So if your gun misfired you "took a rat," and this came to mean to fail in a more general sense. During the nineteenth century the expression prendre un rat was replaced by rater.


Alors, j'ai raté le train, but Bernard was kind enough to wait for me and we did an hour of French, most of which I spent explaining that I am not usually so disorganized. But at least I didn't forget the rendez-vous altogether. I did that once to my kiné, and later Bernard told me the informal way to say I stood the kiné up is to say "j'ai posé un lapin sur le kiné." *   Another animal. It's a zoo out there.


* I put/dropped/laid a rabbit on the physical therapist.

Grammatical Cats

Shameful! Only one post for May and we are more than half-way through the month already.

In my last French lesson, we discussed an article from Télérama, a French magazine about TV, radio, and cinema. The article, "Grammaire Amère"* by Fanny Capel, explores the lamentable decline in correct usage of the French language by schoolchildren and University students.  It begins with some examples of dreadful mistakes, and I am glad to say I spotted most of them! (Cette homme instead of cet homme, for example).  The article continues in a vein all too familiar from American and British education: standards are slipping, the teachers themselves have not been properly taught, some feel grammar is too boring and difficult to inflict on the children, others just feel overwhelmed and short of time. Plus faulty language is all around in the media, and many people don't even recognize the mistakes.

Of course, French grammar and spelling are extremely difficult. One's heart does go out to the small French child struggling with it. But, as with any language, real mastery of it can only come by reading and reading and reading--and not just texts, emails and websites!

The French, as is well-known, on the whole still care deeply about the way the language is used. The slapdash style of Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, has caused widespread perturbation, it seems. Perhaps, here, the search for ways of teaching linguistic mastery to today's children will end in success.

My own mastery is far from complete, of course... and yet, funnily enough, it's when English words are used in the midst of French that I'm often most thrown.  Visiting Lyon once, before living here, I asked an estate agent about areas and what kind of flats were available to rent. She asked, Quel type de budget?  The last word flummoxed me utterly, as I thought she was saying bouger, to move, which made no sense in the context; it couldn't be bougie, candlestick, nor did I think it was a French word for budgie; anyway, I gave up, and she had to spell out the fact that she was trying to ascertain how much money I had to fling around.

Now in this grammar article comes mention of certain proposals "prononcés en off,"  which means off the record. And then there is suddenly a strange reference, it seems, to domestic animals: Pour transmettre efficacement un message, faut-il accepter de sacrifier la forme, comme sur les chats?**

For just one second, I wondered in bewilderment what on earth cats had to do with it.


*Bitter grammar
**To transmit a message efficiently, is it necessary to sacrifice good writing, as on chats?

Floundering in cameo and camaïeu.

In earlier posts of this recently-neglected blog, I bewailed my lack of a French etymological dictionary; this has been rectified by the purchase of the wonderful Dictionnaire Historique de la Langue Française, (2010 edition) edited by Alain Rey. The hefty volume (should have brought my shopping trolley) is beautifully printed, complete with ribbon page-markers, and is a word lover's delight.

On Rue de la République I've noticed--indeed, I've shopped in--a low-priced clothes store with the intriguing vowel-rich name Camaïeu. The logo above the door--a scarlet lily on a purple background--has a tone-on-tone effect, like a coloured silhouette or photographic negative.

I thought camaïeu must mean "cameo" but my français-anglais dictionary said non. "Cameo" is un camée, whereas camaïeu is a word from the realm of painting, meaning "monochrome."  So en camaïeu bleu would be "in blue monochrome," and un camaïeu de roses means "various shades of pink."

The word interested me: more obscure, even poetic, than one would expect for a chain store name, and elusive of easy translation. It stayed in my mind and it was the word I looked up in Rey and in another etymological dictionary while deciding which to buy. Rey's discussion was far more detailed.

When I read the camaïeu entry properly at home, I saw a question mark alongside it, meaning the etymology is obscure.  Earlier forms go back to 1275 (kamahieu), but it's not clear whether the origin is a Latin word or an Arab one. (Interested readers will have to pursue the details).

The basic meaning is une pierre fine taillée formée de deux couches de même couleur, mais de tons différents.* And thus of course it is very close to "cameo" and in fact cameo is the cognate in Italian. But then camaïeu came to mean, by analogy, un genre de peinture imitant le bas-relief, où l'on n'emploie que le blanc et le noir.** This meaning is attested from 1676, and became widespread in the expression en camaïeu. Camaïeu also acquired a figurative artistic sense, péjoratif according to Rey, of "monotone artistic work," ton-sur-ton. That's the meaning given by my French-English dictionary, but Rey says it has fallen out of usage.

Meanwhile, around 1752 cameo was borrowed into French from Italian, as the ancient art of cutting stones in relief to show coloured layers became popular. So the two words existed side by side, camaïeu being used more in the world of painting, and cameo specifically for the jewel, until they conflated from around 1819; so, yes, camaïeu was sometimes used in the nineteenth century to denote a cameo jewel!  Yet the words did not become synonyms; dictionaries, as shown here, still differentiate them.

Confusing, and if I've failed to explain it clearly, no matter. Camaïeu: tone on tone. Camée: cameo (jewel).  What I really love is that this obscure, elusive word decorates the shopping streets of France, alongside Printemps, Darjeeling, and Pataugas ( which latter means hiking boot, from patauger, to wade, paddle, squelch, or flounder).


*a fine cut stone with two layers of the same colour, but of different tones
**a kind of painting imitating bas-relief, using only black and white

It Happens

La Grande Horizontale, c'est moi!  No no no, not in that sense. The sciatica that was making me grincheuse turned into a herniated disk, and I have been flat on the floor for four days, and flat with upright intervals for two.

I haven't been out and about noticing the niceties of French, and in my enfeebled state I've been reading English books instead of the many French ones waiting on my shelves.

However, the upright intervals are more frequent and things are steadily improving, so today I tried to make a couple of phone calls in French, and found to my horror that I have already gone backwards in fluency!  I was making an doctor's appointment and the receptionist offered me quinze or seize and although I knew quinze was fifteen, or three pm, I suddenly for the life of me couldn't grasp what seize was...she had to translate it to the non-twenty-four-hour mode and say "Four."  I felt so daft after all the times I've had Ikea and Darty on the phone giving me their delivery windows between this hour and that, and I've understood.

Then--on a roll, feeling I was getting things done after all the inaction--I called the person who is in charge of administering the practical aspects of life in our apartment building to ask why, all of a sudden, the door to the little room in the hall where one puts one's rubbish is locked, and the numerical code to unlock it doesn't work; only I couldn't summon up the name for that little room, or the word for rubbish.

She patiently explained to me that I meant the locale poubelles, which of course I knew really; local or locale is little room, workshop, premises, and poubelles are dustbins (or garbage cans); and she grasped what I meant as I babbled various attempts to say "rubbish" (since there's not much else one would put in the locale poubelles, after all). I felt like what used to be called a blithering idiot and can only put it down to the medication (not that I'm on anything strong) and to my recent isolation from the general French chatter one hears every day just going about one's business.

Household rubbish is les ordures, the dictionary reminds me. Yet another example of the everyday French word sounding more lofty and high-falutin' than the English--of course we could say "ordure" if we wanted to, but trash, rubbish, and garbage seem better to fit the bill.  Of course there's probably a much more basic French word for "rubbish"...and I don't mean merde.