A time and a place for everything

One evening I was riding the métro home, minding my own business, when a very, very drunk man got on.  He was carrying an open bottle of some sort of hard liquor, and occasionally took a swig.  (This and other obscure vocabulary items discussed in the English notes below.)  He was so plastered that he could barely stay on his seat as the train swerved.  He ranted incoherently–really incoherently.  (After he left, I asked the guy next to me: Pardon me sir, was he speaking French?  (If it’s in italics, it happened in French.) He gave me that look that people in Paris (and New York) give you when approached by a stranger before deciding that you’re OK, and then said: Of a sort.)

A young woman got on the train and took a seat.  She had her phone to her ear, and was talking.  The drunk, ranting guy leaned over, put his fingers to his lip, and said: Shhhhhh.

Bizarre, hein?  No–in a Parisian context, this actually wasn’t surprising at all.  The general French approach to politeness is: don’t do anything that would inconvenience the other person.  A very noticeable way that this works out is that in general, the French tend to communicate more quietly than Americans do.  Indeed, the first thing that I notice when I get off the plane in the US is how loud everyone is–I clear Customs, go sit in the United club, and find myself listening to the cell phone conversations of every random stranger within earshot. In Paris, if you see someone talking on the phone on the train, the chances are excellent that they’re not French–it’s just not done.  So, it wasn’t that bizarre for a shitfaced lunatic to interrupt his raving to say shhhhh to someone talking on the phone on the métro—he might have been hammered, but she was being rude.  In America, someone would have said some equivalent of “it’s a free country, she can talk on the phone if she wants to.”  People did hush him up when he got too carried away, but no one criticized him for saying shhhhh to the girl on the phone–that’s just logical, quoi...

For an extended discussion of the “don’t inconvenience the other guy” principle in French culture, see Raymonde Carroll’s Cultural misunderstandings: The French-American experience, or the original French version, Évidences invisibles: Américains et Français au quotidien.  Carroll’s book is the uber-citation on American/French cultural differences.

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I thought about the drunk guy on the train and his shhhhh just now when I stepped out on my balcony (I have the good luck to have an apartment on the étage noble) for a cigarette–and overheard a delivery guy in the street below speaking on his phone.  Avant qu’elle apparaisse, he said–before she appears.  Even though I’m in France, where correcting other people’s grammar is just part of daily intercourse, I suppressed the urge to yell avant qu’elle N‘apparaisse–who doesn’t hate to see a good opportunity to use the ne expletif be wasted?–on the theory that this guy’s day was already going poorly enough without the shame of having some random foreigner fuck with his langue de Molière.  A time and a place for everything.

For the meaning of étage noble and the significance of what floor you live on, see this post on Parisian apartment buildings.  English notes below.

 

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English notes

swig: the amount drunk at one time; a gulp.  (Merriam-Webster)  Some examples from the English Preposition Corpus, courtesy of Sketch Engine, purveyor of fine linguistic data sources and search engines therefor (note the lack of an E at the end–therefor is a different word from therefore):

• I scowled into the night, took a swig of my beer and dumped the rest over the side of the deck .
• I picked up the bottle beside me and took another long swig.
•  If, after a stiff swig of nectar, we were to watch further developments, we’d find that in another 100,000 years or so, or even longer, exactly the same thing would happen again, and the compass would swing back suddenly to its original position.

How I used it in the post: He was carrying an open bottle of some sort of hard liquor, and occasionally took a swig. 

plastered: slang for drunk.  Some examples from the enTenTen corpus (just under 20 billion words of English scraped from the Web), again courtesy of Sketch Engine:

• Once Dolly and I got really plastered together.
• An hour or so later, the Englishman is really plastered. 
• Jonathan is so ugly; I could only have sex with that double bagger if I was really plastered. 
• And by “former glory,” of course, we mean “a time when college-aged people used beer pong as an excuse to get so plastered they sometimes made sexual overtures toward bar stools.
• Only to realise the switch happens yet again and you’re there staring at the mouth of Gingy the Gingerbread Man (Midgett in a triplicate role with Sugar Plum) so plastered on that baking sheet like an angry drunk.

How I used it in the post: He was so plastered that he could barely stay on his seat as the train swerved. 

shitfaced: also slang for drunk.  Don’t use this one in front of my grandmother.

• The night ended with Patty directing my drunk ass to grab the mattress and set up the bed while I was completely stumbling and shitfaced.
• Let me get this straight — this stuff supposedly gives you more energy … so you can stay out later, drink more and get more thoroughly shitfaced?
• The end of the week and I’m tired, over-worked and really just in need of deep sleep so I can get to work the next day with a fresh brain that can fire on all six creative cylinders but I opt to get shitfaced on free beer instead. 
• In the Black Forest they celebrate by getting shitfaced, setting fire to 800-lb straw-packed oak wheels, rolling them down mountainsides into sleepy villages and making bets on the fates of the panicked peasantry as they flee in terror.

How I used it in the post: It wasn’t that bizarre for a shitfaced lunatic to interrupt his raving to say shhhhh to someone talking on the phone on the métro—he might have been hammered, but she was being rude. 

hammered: ….and, once again: slang for drunk.  

• By the time we got to the dessert, I was, to put it delicately, hammered , as you can see from the picture above.
• Made me want to check out more, especially as I was so hammered that I was in danger of keeling over, and consequently remember very little, other than that it was good.
• I think the only way I’ll ever feel the urge to try that is if I’m already so hammered that it seems like a really good idea.

How I used it in the post: It wasn’t that bizarre for a shitfaced lunatic to interrupt his raving to say shhhhh to someone talking on the phone on the métro—he might have been hammered, but she was being rude. 

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Conflict of interest statement: I don’t have one.  Sketch Engine doesn’t pay me to shill their stuff–I pay them to use it.