vocabulary – Page 20

Screwing things up

north_face_south_tower_after_plane_strike_9-11 I first heard about the 9/11 attacks while sitting in my office. I’d just eaten my peanut butter sandwich–3 hours before lunch. Crap. My wife called: a plane had flown into one of the World Trade Center towers. Private plane? Airliner? Accidentally? On purpose? No one knew. Soon she called back: the other tower had been hit, too.

All of the news sites were crashing under the load, but one of my office mates had a radio–not a common thing in those days. People gathered around; we listened as the towers fell, as the Pentagon was hit, as Flight UA93 went down in Pennsylvania.

One of the grad students wasn’t quite there with the rest of us, though. After an hour or two, he said: this is huge, and the repercussions of this are going to be playing out for years, but I really need to get this assignment finished. …and he went back to hacking.

Personally, I was useless for the rest of the day. Around noon, it seemed pretty clear that nothing else was going to happen, and I went home to see if I could catch it on TV. We talked about how to break the news to my kid. We found out how to donate blood. I spent hours on the phone trying to make sure that my cousin who spent a lot of time at the Pentagon was OK. Work: not at all.

I felt pretty much the same today. 6 AM China time found me sitting in front of my computer watching the first returns come in. By mid-morning, I did what I do when I’m really, really unhappy: I crawled into bed and went to sleep. When I got up an hour later, the situation was even worse. The rest of the day was spent flipping between NBC and the Politico web site, where I watched the pool of red spread across the country. Normally when I’m anxious, I deal with it by working. A very adaptive response, I find–but, I was way beyond anxiety. As bizarre as this will sound: I found myself passing the time waiting for Trump to give his acceptance speech making French vocabulary flash-cards, because that’s at least easy and distracting, and it gave me a way to think about something other than the fact that a complete assclown had just been elected president of the most powerful country in the world (for the moment–until he fucks it up; assclown explained below in the English notes). When it was all over, I found myself doing something that I haven’t done in a long, long, long time: watching cartoons on TV. They were on the one French-language station that I’ve found in China. It was about ninja cats. They used the subjunctive, so I’m counting it as studying.

As it happens, I’ve been trying to find a good French equivalent for the American English expression “to screw (something) up” or “to mess (something) up.” I’ve been using merder, but I have a feeling that it’s too vulgar for a lot of contexts. Sometimes you come across things right when you need them, and as I watched a lot of American voters screw up very badly, I came across foirer and faire foirer. I found these definitions of them:

foirer: to screw (something) up, to mess (something) up (WordReference). To mess up, to go wrong, to fail (Reverso.net).
faire foirer: to mess (something) up (Collins)

OPUS2 is a collection of millions of words in the same text translated between about 40 different languages–what’s known as a parallel corpus. EUROPARL is another parallel corpus–a collection of the proceedings of the European Parliament translated between all of the languages of the European Union. I searched them through the Sketch Engine web site’s interface.

Seems relatively innocuous. However, looking at translations on line, I think it might be stronger than the dictionary suggests. I found translations along the lines of “screw/mess up,” but I also found plenty of “fuck up,” particularly in the OPUS2 corpus. And, foirer doesn’t show up even once in the EUROPARL corpus, which is consistent with the idea that it might not be as socially acceptable as the WordReference and Collins definitions suggest. (Neither does merder.) Here are some examples of both, from OPUS2 and from the Linguee.fr web site.

Foirer:

Tu foires tout! You’ve done nothing but screw up! (OPUS2)
J’ai tout foiré. I messed up bad. (OPUS2)
J’ai eu ma chance et j’ai foiré. I had my chance, and I muffed it. (OPUS2)
C’était comme un mariage foiré. It was like a really fucked up wedding. (OPUS2)
Et qu’arrivera-t-il si je foire tout encore une fois? What happens if I fuck up again? (OPUS2)
II y a huit jours, vous êtes arrivé défoncé à une simple néphrectomie, vous l’avez foirée, mis le patient en syncope en le tuant presque. Eight days ago you showed up half-stoned for a simple nephrectomy … botched it, put the patient in failure, and damn near killed him. (OPUS2)
Ça foire quand on arrive aux desserts. It always goes wrong when we come to the desserts. (OPUS2)
Depuis que je suis rentré, je foire tout ce que j’entreprends. It’ s just that since I got back, it seems like the only natural talent I got is for screwing up. (OPUS2)
J’ai foiré mon audition aujourd’hui. I did terribly at an audition today. (OPUS2)
Si ça a foiré , je veux savoir comment. If this is fucked up, I wanna know how. (OPUS2)
Nous avons tenté de faire une tournée à l’étranger et deux tournées étaient presque confirmées mais bien sûr elles ont foiré à la fin. We tried to get some abroad tour and two tours were already nearly confirmed but of course in the end they fucked up. (Linguee.fr)
Ceci est susceptible de faire foirer votre partenaire, puisqu’il a alors un temps mort, et qu’il ne relancera donc pas la… This trick is likely to make your partner fuck up the pattern as she gets a ‘hold’, and thus won’t be passing back the same… (Linguee.fr) (I put this under faire rather than faire foirer because it’s the partner who’s going to foirer–a different construction from faire foirer followed by a direct object, I think.)
…lieu 20 minutes avant que CATHEDRAL ne monte sur scène : j’ai littéralement foiré ma performance à cause du style vocal ! …literally 20 minutes before CATHEDRAL was due to play on stage, so I literally fucked my performance due to the vocal style! (Linguee.fr) (Can’t wait to see the reactions to avant que…ne monte!)

Faire foirer:

Vous faites foirer le plan. You’re screwing up the plan. (OPUS2)
Seulement si tu fais tout foirer. Only if you blow it, dear. (OPUS2)
Il me plaît vraiment, alors ne fais pas tout foirer. I really like him, so don’t screw this up. (OPUS2)
C’est comme si tu voulais tout faire foirer. It’s like you’re actually trying to screw this up. (OPUS2)
Mais j’ai juste tout fait foirer pour tout le monde. …but I’ve just messed up everything for everyone. (OPUS2)
Ensuite, le bureau central fait tout foirer. And the Central Office then proceeds to screw everything up. (OPUS2)
Nous sommes en parfaite osmose avec Waldemar et nous ne pouvions pas nous permettre de tout faire foirer. We are in perfect osmosis with Waldemar and we could not allow ourselves to screw everything up. (Linguee.fr)

Native speakers: how about it? Can I say merder at work? Can I say (faire) foirer at work? In front of a friend’s children? In front of a friend’s mother? Input appreciated. Like the grad student said: the repercussions of yesterday’s American presidential election are going to be playing out for years, and I think that I’m going to be needing a way to talk about how badly the American voter has “screwed things up” for quite a while to come…

English notes

In Assholes: A theory of Donald Trump (originally published under the title Assholes: A theory) the philosopher Aaron James defines assholes in general like this:

A person counts as an asshole, when and only when, he systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.

As described in John Kelly’s article In honor of the GOP nominee: What exactly is an assclown?, originally from the Strong Language blog, James goes on to develop a typologoy of assholery; assclown in particular is defined as follows:

…someone who seeks an audience’s enjoyment while being slow to understand how it views him.

Roommates, Mars landings, and the descriptive/prescriptive contrast in linguistics

In which I take a rare turn towards prescriptivism and advocate for the French verb amarsir: to land on Mars.

quotative_like_2x — The ultimate descriptivist shoulder-shrug. Picture source: https://xkcd.com/1483/.

The topic of conversation over lunch today: is there, or is there not, a feminine form of the word for “roommate?” Someone used the word colocatrice, someone objected that it’s invariant colocataire, and we were off to the races. (This and other American English expressions explained in the English notes.) It was a nice example of a stereotypical French behavior: engaging in heated discussions of the French language.

The first day of a Linguistics 101 class, you teach your students the difference between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to language. Prescriptive approaches to language, ethics, or whatever are approaches based on the goal of telling people what to do or how to do it. In English-language schools, all instruction concerning the English language is prescriptive: we’re taught that ending a sentence with a preposition is wrong, that you must say I don’t have rather than I don’t got, and that you’re supposed to say Mary and I, not Mary and me.

In contrast, descriptive approaches to language seek to describe language–what actually happens in it–and to understand the implications of what happens in a language for our understanding of language in general. (French has separate words for these–langue and langage, respectively–and the more that I (start to) understand them, the more that I wish that we had them in English.)

I’m a linguist by training, by profession, and by nature, and linguists are entirely descriptivists. (You could make an argument for an exception to this in the case of issues of language and gender, but for a linguist, prescriptive statements along the lines of encouraging gender neutrality in language are always preceded by data on the subject.) For me, as a linguist, the idea of something linguistic being right or wrong, correct or incorrect, has no more meaning than the notion of a particular variant in mosquito wing beat rates being right or wrong to an entomologist–for me, it’s all data, and I just want to know what the facts are, and then figure out what the facts mean for our understanding of language. It’s not that I don’t care whether or not you end sentences with a preposition–rather, I want to know how often you do or don’t end a sentence with a preposition, and how that frequency varies depending on who you’re speaking to when you do it, whether you’re speaking or just writing, what your power relationship is with the person to whom you’re speaking, whether or not you’re the same gender as that person, what gender you are to begin with, where you grew up, what your social aspirations are, how you identify yourself, how long the sentence is, how long the noun phrase that the preposition modifies is, whether or not the noun phrase was mentioned earlier in the conversation, etc., etc., etc. Ultimately, my expectation is that I’ll end up with a bunch of numbers, and then I’ll draw a graph, or build a regression model, or something. The notions of correct and incorrect don’t enter it. Just not relevant to anything that I care about as a linguist.

So, it should come as a surprise to you–and it certainly comes as a surprise to me–that right here and now, I am going to advocate that you use a particular verb. As you may be aware, some days ago the European ExoMars Schiaparelli lander went silent during its descent toward the Red Planet and was later photographed in pieces on the ground. This sad event followed a period of considerable excitement in the local geekosphere, but this being France, also occasioned some linguistic anxiety. The burning question: what verb do you use to refer to a landing on Mars?

French is quite well equipped with words that refer to the action of landing on or touching down on–on purpose or otherwise–something. In particular, you have the following:

atterrir: to land; to end up, to wind up; figuratively, to come back down to earth.
alunir: to land on the moon.
amerrir: to land on the sea; to splash down.

What might not be immediately evident is that all of these verbs incorporate the noun referring to the thing that is landed on. Here are the three nouns and the verbs that are derived from them:

What you’re landing on	Incorporated noun	Verb
Earth	la Terre (Earth)	atterrir
the moon	la lune (moon)	alunir
the ocean	la mer (sea)	amerrir

So, while in English you use the verb to land and then have the option of also specifying what exactly what landed on, in French you use a variety of different verbs. I’ve gotten examples by using the Sketch Engine web site, which lets me search for words in French and gives me the English translation of the French sentence:

En cas de problème moins de 30 mn après le décollage, faites demi-tour et amerrissez. If you should develop motor trouble within a half hour after leaving the Hornet, fly back to the ship and land in the water.
Si on amerrit maintenant, on aurait peut-être la chance d’être repêchés. If we land on the water now, we might have a rescue.
Hier, un engin spatial américain a amerri au large des côtes de Californie. Yesterday, a U. S. spacecraft splashed down off the Southern California coast.
Amerrissez là. Land here.
On amerrit. We’ re ditching.
Le 6 octobre de l’année dernière, c’est ici que j’ai amerri pour prendre Tim et Amie. On October 6 last year, this is the spot here at Kaflia Lake where I pulled in to pick up Tim and Amie.

moon-lander-se-pose-xvmfb059012-c5d7-11e5-a73a-0308cf460797 — Le Figaro hashed through a similar question at the time of the 1966 Luna IX landing on the moon. They were on the wrong side of history. Picture source: http://i.f1g.fr/media/figaro/805x453_crop/2016/02/02/XVMfb059012-c5d7-11e5-a73a-0308cf460797.jpg

For landing on the moon, there’s a different verb: alunir.

On n’a pas aluni. We didn’ t land on the moon.
Malheureusement, on n’alunit pas. Well, unfortunately, we’re not landing on the moon, are we?
Le LEM est conçu pour alunir, pas pour faire des corrections de trajectoire. We designed the LEM to land on the moon, not fire the engine out there for course corrections.
Apollo a-t-elle vraiment aluni ? Did the Apollo really land on the moon?
Six équipes à deux hommes ont fait alunisage et ont rapporté divers prélèvements. Six two-man teams landed on the moon and returned various samples.

There’s another sense of the English verb to land, in the sense of troops, an explorer, or something like that landing somewhere after an ocean voyage: débarquer. (We have an English cognate: to debark.)

Le site du bassin Brown est chargé d’histoire puisque c’est là que débarquèrent les soldats britanniques du général Wolfe en 1759. The Brown Basin site is laden with history, because this is where General Wolfe’s British soldiers landed in 1759.
…des poissons et produits de la pêche qu’ilsdéclarent les quantités débarquées, transbordées, mises en vente ou achetées. …fish and fishery products should be required to declare the quantities landed, transhipped, offered for sale or purchased.
À la fin du 15e siècle, quand les Européens débarquent officiellement en Amérique du Nord avec Christophe Colomb en tête… At the end of the 15th century, when Europeans first officially landed in North America, led by Christopher Columbus and then John
Comment mes troupes peuvent-elles debarquer sur Midway si les avions et les batteries de cote ennemis ne sont pas neutraIises? How am I expected to land my invasion forces on Midway, unless the enemy airfields and shore batteries have been neutralized?

Now, bombs and rockets can land, too, in English. French has a verb for this one: tomber. Remember that tomber uses être for the passé composé:

Une roquette taliban est tombée dans le fleuve lors de la première semaine de construction, mais autrement, le chantier… A Taliban rocket landed in the river nearby during the first week of construction, but the site has not been attacked.
Toutes les bombes sont tombées sur leurs cibles et toute la moitié ouest du village semblait s’élever dans les airs. All bombs landed where they were aimed for and the entire west half of the village seemed to rise into the air.

There’s something that I like about these three verbs, which is this: they are all regular IR-class verbs. Now, about 80% of French verbs fall into the regular ER-class, and it’s said that the ER-class is the only one that’s productive. What “productive” means: in this case, it means that it’s the only class that modern speakers are creating new verbs for. When a new verb is needed–tweeter, chunker, télécharger–it goes into the ER-class.

This takes us back to the European Mars lander. The question in French is: when all of your verbs for landing a vehicle lexicalize what you’re landing on–atterrir for the Earth, alunir for the moon, and amerrir for the sea–don’t you need a new verb for landing on Mars? Lots of people feel that you do, and that it would naturally follow the pattern for verbs that encode what you’re landing on. Those are IR-class verbs. So, if we get a new verb for landing on Mars, it will be amarsir, and then we’ll have something quite unusual: a new IR-class verb. And IR-class verbs are cool!

Why IR-class verbs are cool:

Unlike the more common ER-class verbs, they have a real subjunctive. J’atterris, but que j’atterrisse; on alunit, but qu’on alunisse.
The present participle requires -ss– : tout en atterrissant.
Same for the imperfect tense: nous amerrissions.

Now, “cool” is not a technical description. But, seriously: what’s not to love? Although to a linguist, inconsistency is boring, as a language learner, I find it charming. (This blog post, Linguists versus normal people, explains why irregularities in a language aren’t particularly interesting to linguists, in general. I love a good irregular verb–but as a civilian, so to speak, not as a linguist.)

So: although in my professional life–and in my thinking about language in general–I’m very much a descriptivist, I’m going to break with my norms and take a prescriptivist stance: we should all be saying amarsir to describe landing on Mars.

Now, that stalwart of prescriptivism, Le Figaro, disagrees with me here. It takes a typical prescriptivist approach to the question of how to refer to landing on Mars: in a recent essay on the subject, Alice Develey examines a number of dictionaries. Finding no dictionary that lists amarsir but an on-line one, and multiple traditional dictionaries that define atterrir as “to land” without any specification of what’s being landed on, she concludes that a Mars landing should be referred to with the verb atterrir, as well.

Si l’on se fie donc aux dictionnaires, les Terriens et les Martiens ont la même légitimité à atterrir sur le sol de la planète bleue que celui de la planète rouge!

“Thus, if one trusts in dictionaries, Earthlings and Martians have the same right to atterrir on the Blue Planet as on the Red Planet!” …and prescriptivists pretty much always “trust in dictionaries.” Certainly it’s true that if you look at naturally occurring data, you will see that atterrir is used for landing on all kinds of things, such as aircraft carriers. However, there’s been use of amarsir, as well–going back to 189t, according to Wiktionnarie. In this particular case, I can at least excuse my shameful prescriptiveness with a bit of empirical data. Sadly, the failed Mars landing keeps refusing to come up in conversation, and I haven’t been able to create facts on the ground by casually using it. I’m not dead yet, though…

Coincidentally, my email today contained a notice about the book Language between description and prescription: Verbs and verb categories in nineteenth-century grammars of English, by Lieselotte Anderwald. Check it out and let us know how you liked it…

English notes

to be off to the races: to have started something, to have reached a state of successfully performing an activity. The Free Dictionary gives this definition: an expression characterizing the activity or excitement that is just beginning. Wiktionary gives this: In or into a process of energetic engagement in some activity; in or into a phase of conspicuously increasing satisfaction or success. Notice that in both of them, there’s a crucial element of change–of beginning something, or of having a notable increase in something. How it was used in the post: Someone used the word colocatrice, someone objected that it’s invariant colocataire, and we were off to the races. The meaning is that someone did something, someone else reacted, and that was the beginning of engagement in the activity of talking about language.

The contradictions of a French château

chateau_de_chenonceau_2008e — The Château de Chenonceau. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4924052

When I arrived in Paris for the first time, my cousin drove me by the Place de la Concorde. That’s where we chopped the Royalists’ fucking heads off, he said. It’s a good example of the European tendency to have a very long memory, as compared to the typical American preference to look only towards the future. It’s also a good example of my family’s general lefty-ness—on both sides of the Atlantic, actually. In light of that lefty-ness, I’ve always had mixed feelings about the French fondness for the great Renaissance-era châteux. So, it was without great enthusiasm that I let myself be talked out of my general impulse to never, ever leave Paris and be talked into a tour of Chenonceau, one of the finer ones. As I looked out of the windows at the beauty of the sun setting over the Cher River, I found myself wondering, over and over again: just how many peasants did one have to starve in order to build such an edifice?

cha%cc%82teau_de_chenonceau_1914_a_1918_15 — Mme. Menier assisting in surgery at the château during World War I. The influence of women at Chenanceau has always been strong, leading to its nickname, the Château des Dames. Picture source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_de_Chenonceau#/media/File:Ch%C3%A2teau_de_Chenonceau_1914_%C3%A0_1918_(15).jpg

And yet: like so many things in France, it’s more complicated than it looked to me at first glance. Is Chenonceau a vestige of a brutal feudal system, built on the backs of starving farmers? Absolutely. It was also, under the ownership of Louise Dupin, essentially a country salon for many of the Lumières–the Enlightenment thinkers, philosophers, writers, and Encyclopédistes who laid the intellectual groundwork for the 1789 Revolution that would end the aristrocratic system (minus minor bumps in the road in the forms of the First and Second Empires and a Restoration that I don’t really understand) that had kept the French people in a state of servitude for so long. During World War I, the owner of the château, Gaston Menier, would turn it into a hospital at his own expense; over 2,000 soldiers would be nursed back to health there. During the Second World War, the line of demarcation between the Free Zone and the German-occupied zone was marked by the Cher River, and the bridge over that river that the château formed (see the picture above) became a method of transit for Resistance fighters and for Jews escaping from the slaughter that claimed the lives of 70,000.

French notes

le château fort: a “strong castle,” the original castles of the Middle Ages, built for defense from attacks. If I understand correctly, the invention of artillery made them considerably less useful–building a castle in a way that would withstand artillery made them uncomfortable to live in.

le château Renaissance: a “Renaissance castle,” serving essentially as a country residence for royalty and aristrocracy, rather than as a defensive structure as was the case with the old châteuax forts.

la solive: joist. French buildings of this era often had magnificent ceilings, and I was quite surprised at how many rooms in Chenonceau have solives apparentes–ceilings with exposed joists.

Urban weirdness, and where to buy the best macarons in Paris

Macarons and revolutionaries: just another day in the Big City.

Days of cramming French grammar have left me with a terrible need for fresh air, sunshine, and at least a bit of exercise, so I shut my laptop this afternoon and went out for a walk. Mission: track down an antique book dealer that I came across one day, and find the best macarons in Paris.

Big cities often offer us a bit of urban weirdness, and Paris did not disappoint me today. To wit: just down the avenue de Breteuil from Les Invalides, I encountered the following scene.

That little cluster of brown things that you see on the grass towards the right of the photo turns out to be this flock of sheep:

What are they doing there? I can only guess. Cutting the grass, perhaps.

A bit further down, on the left side of the street as you walk south from Les Invalides, is the best place in Paris to buy macarons. These cream-filled bits of meringue are a popular Parisian delicacy. The best ones in town turn out to come from a Japanese bakery called Mori Yoshida, 65 avenue de Breteuil. The owners fell in love with French baking and moved to Paris to realize their dream of exploring the possibilities of melding the French arts of the boulanger and the pâtissier with a Japanese sensibility. They have truly mastered the macaron, and this is where I would take you to get your fix.

I never did find the dealer in old books, but I did stumble across this little beauty in a used bookstore in my neighborhood–an account of the trials of the leaders of the Paris Commune, my personal favorite of the various French Revolutions. (Ask a French person a question about the Revolution, and the response may be which one?)

French notes: Sheep-related vocabulary! All links are to WordReference. Scroll down for a cute poster.

le mouton: sheep; mutton; sheepskin. Also: a credulous person.
la brebis: ewe.
le brebis: sheep-milk cheese.
le bélier: ram.
l’agneau (n.m.): lamb (the animal and the meat).
la bergerie: sheep pen; also a circular counter
allaiter: to nurse, to breast feed
l’herbivore (n.m.): herbivore.
le mammifère: mammal.

mouton-4dcd26dce04c746ec097f0044d0f047e — Picture source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/3659243422218653/

Where to eat breakfast in Paris

le-campanella-breakfast-img_7170 — Le Campanella, corner of avenue Bosquet and rue Saint-Dominique. Picture source: me.

For my money, Bulgaria is one of the best breakfast countries in the world. (For my money explained below in the English notes.) Yoghurt, figs, amazing doughnuts, coffee–on and on, at least if you have the good luck to be offered it in a farmhouse in Koprivshtitsa, which I did. Japan is another marvel in the breakfast department, at least if you’re being served it in a hotel–fish, rice, pickles, and some miso soup make for a great start to your day, actually.

France is a different story. If you’re travelling in Paris and therefore not eating out of your own kitchen, the cafes will basically offer you two options:

Something that they’ll call a “French” breakfast: coffee, juice, and a piece of baguette with butter and jam, or a croissant.
Something that they’ll call an “English” breakfast: coffee, juice, some sort of sausage, an egg or two, and baked beans.

You can make it for a while on the “French” breakfast, especially if you add a piece of fruit–I do, every day–but, personally, I can’t make it all the way to lunch on that, and in a country where people don’t really snack, that’s a problem. The “English” breakfast: baked beans and a nasty piece of sausage for breakfast? Not on an empty stomach.

This morning, though: this morning I happened across a good breakfast for 10 euros. The place: Le Campanella, 18 avenue Bosquet, right on the corner of avenue Bosquet and rue Saint-Dominique. Drink not included, so it was maybe 12.50 with coffee. Sounds like a lot, but I’ve seen more charged for those English breakfasts–a lot more. 10 euros got me four eggs sunny-side-up, my choice of meat, a salad, and of course some bread. The best part? I learned how to say “sunny side up” in French! The only wrinkle: there’s a 15 euro minimum on credit cards, and I was out of cash, which is why you see that little “to go” box on the front-most table in the picture–I had to buy a piece of apple buy to have a large enough bill to justify using a credit card. Poor me, I know…

rugby-gastronomie-img_7171 — Le Campanella, corner of avenue Bosquet and rue Saint-Dominique. Picture source: me.

The location is quite close to the Eiffel Tower, and it would make a lot of sense to start your day with breakfast at Le Campanella, and then head over to the Eiffel Tower, stopping on the way there at L’esprit du Sud-ouest for some very non-touristy sportswear, following up the Tower with lunch on the rue Cler. Just sayin’.

French notes

les oeufs au plat: eggs sunny-side-up.

English notes

for my money: in my opinion. How it was used in the post: For my money, Bulgaria is one of the best breakfast countries in the world.
in the X department: when you’re talking about X; concerning X; related to X. Tough to define! Here are some examples, and my attempts to explain them.
- Again, it should be of no surprise that Fox News takes first place in the lies department. Meaning: you shouldn’t be surprised that with respect to lies, Fox News has the largest number. Source: here.
- Since I failed epically in the marriage department, I think dating is out. Meaning: since where marriage is concerned, I failed very badly, I don’t think that dating is something that I should do. Source: here (scroll down to the comments).
- If the Leafs pick up Neil as well, the team is going to put Burke’s Ducks squad to shame in the dirtbag department. Meaning: if the Leafs hire that guy, then they’re going to be even more richly endowed in dirtbags than the Ducks. Source: here.
- How it was used in the post: Japan is another marvel in the breakfast department.

Tutelary gods and how to use “tout”

montaigne-img_7084 — Statue of Michel de Montaigne on the rue des Ecoles. It makes me all warm and gooey inside to know that my grandfather probably visited this statue for the same reason that I did. Picture source: me.

I’m a big believer in tutelary gods. These are the local deities that rule over or protect a place. You could make a good case that part of the reason that Judiasm was able to survive its exile from its place of origin was that the original idea of its typically Fertile Crescent god–he lived on top of a particular hill, and in order to really worship him properly, you had to go there–changed to an idea of an immanent god who was everywhere, in all things. (Yes, he is transcendent in Judaism, too, as far as I know–it’s complicated.) And yet: the old tutelary gods live on. It’s worth paying attention to the kami when you’re in Japan, and Pele in Hawaii.

montaigne-right-foot-img_7085 — Montaigne’s right foot, polished by generations of students touching it for luck with their tests. Picture source: me.

As far as I can tell, the only relevant deity in the Paris region is Montaigne. Also known as Eyquem, Michel de Montaigne was a writer who is widely considered to be the father of the modern essay and the grandfather of all magazine writers. There’s a statue of him on the rue des Ecoles. I passed by it on my way home today expressly to engage in the rites of Montaigne-worship, which consist of rubbing the toe of his right foot for luck before a test. The reason: I had just finished the first of four days of language-testing that I’ll be doing this week and next week, and I was not feeling happy about the valuable insight that I’d gotten into my weak points.

A lot of what I struggled with on today’s exams didn’t bother me that much–a super-fast speaker, mostly. But, I was pretty down on myself when I still found myself struggling with the A2-level issue of tout/tous/toute/toutes. In theory, these four words all mean all of, but it gets a bit more complicated than that, and there is also a pronunciation issue: tous is pronounced as tou most of the time, but tousse on occasion. Throw in there the fact that I was never sure how to spell some of the stuff that I know how to say, like tout ce que je veux…, and you see how I might still be struggling with this–despite the fact that a class that I attended last winter spent an hour on it one day!

I’ll lay this out a bit differently than other explanations that I’ve seen: I’m going to put the idiomatic expressions first. These get used a lot, and if you can remember that they’re (almost) all the same form, tout, that might make it easier to digest the complexity that follows.

Here are some idiomatic expressions with tout. I took them from Eli Blume and Gail Stein’s French: Three years review text, just because that’s the one reference for English speakers that I happen to have lying around my apartment:

en tout cas: in any case, at any rate
pas du tout: not at all
tout à coup: all of a sudden, suddenly (see also tout d’un coup, below)
tout à fait: indeed
tout à l’heure: just now; in a little bit
tout de même: nevertheless
tout de suite: immediately
tout le monde: everybody, everyone
tout le temps: all the time

Some others that you’re likely to run into:

tout doucement: slowly
malgré tout: despite everything, in spite of everything
tout droit: straight ahead
tout d’un coup: all of a sudden, suddenly (see also tout à coup above)

…and now the only fixed expressions that I know of with a form other than tout:

toute la journée: all day
tous les jours: every day
toutes les nuits: every night
tous les quatre: all the time, often
tous les deux, toutes les deux: both

With that out of the way, let’s talk about what people usually talk about first: using tout to mean “all (of).” Something important to remember here that might be difficult to remember if you’re an English-speaker: you do not follow this tout with de. Don’t, don’t, don’t.

When used in this way, tout agrees in number and gender with the noun that it’s modifying, the forms being:

tout: masculine singular (tout le gateau all of the cake, the whole cake)
tous: masculine plural (tous ces amis all (of) his friends)
toute: feminine singular (toute la durée de vie all of the life cycle)
toutes: feminine plural (toutes les peintures all (of) the paintings

You probably noticed that all of those examples were followed by a definite article (i.e., some form of the word the). You can also use it before a noun without an article to mean every or any. In this case, it agrees with the gender of the noun, but the number is always singular:

Tout tatou est poète ! Every armadillo is a poet! (Tex’s French Grammar web site)
Je contredirai ceux et celles qui croient que toute femme prend la décision de mettre fin à sa grossesse le cœur léger… I would contradict those people who believe that any woman takes the decision to terminate a pregnancy lightly… (Linguee.fr web site)

You could think of the preceding examples as quantifiers–they specify how many or how much of something specified. All of his friends, all of the cake. Every armadillo, any woman. Tout can also function as a pronoun, not quantifying something, but replacing something. In this case, you’re either going to have tout to mean something like “everything,” or you’re going to have one of the two plural forms–tous, or toutes, depending on the gender of what’s being replaced. Here is the one case (that I know of) where you pronounce tous as tousse (I don’t know whether or not you have liaison to touze):

Tout s’est bien goupillé. Everything came together well (said by a friend of some slides that she put together for a PowerPoint presentation).
Ils partageront tout. They will share everything. (Blume and Stein)
Tout ce qu’il dit est la vérité. Everything he says is the truth. (Blume and Stein)
Mes amis sont venus et tous étaient contents. My friends came and they all were happy. (Kwiziq French web site) (Liaison? I don’t know. Native speakers?)
Les filles sont allées aux toilettes toutes ensemble. The girls all went to the bathroom together. (Transparent Language French blog)
Ils sont tous invités They’re all invited (my tutor)
Tous sont malades Everybody’s sick (my tutor)

Now: tout as an adverb. We’ll call it an adverb when it modifies an adjective. In this case, it means something like completely or entirely.

Il me parle tout bas He talks all Barry White to me (Edith Piaf, La vie en rose–technically it’s modifying another adverb here, but we’ll let that go)
Il est tout pâle He’s totally pale (my tutor)
Tout simplement simply put, simply, just (Linguee.fr–again we’re modifying another adverb)
Tout comme just like; il est grand, tout comme ses parents He’s big, just like his parents (WordReference.com)
C’est tout comme “same difference,” “it’s close enough” Il ne m’a pas insulté mais c’est tout comme ! He didn’t insult me, but he might as well have! (WordReference.com)

…and now it gets tough. You’ll notice that in all cases, we had tout in the same form. But, there’s an exception. If the adjective:

…is feminine, and…
…starts with a consonant or with h aspiré…

…then it becomes toute or toutes. For example:

Diane a mangé la pizza tout entière. Diane ate the whole pizza. (Transparent Language French web site) The adjective entière is feminine, since pizza is feminine–but, it starts with a vowel, so we have tout, not toute.
C’est une fille toute petite, mais elle peut tout faire! She’s a small girl, but she can do it all! (Transparent Language French web site) The adjective petite is feminine AND it starts with a consonant, so we have toute.
En outre, vu ses propriétés en matière de construction, elle est tout indiquée pour les hauts murs non porteurs… In addition, because of its constructional properties, it is particularly suitable for high, non-load-bearing walls… (Linguee.fr) The adjective indiqée is feminine, but it doesn’t start with a vowel or h aspiré, so we have tout.
Elles sont tout autant africaines qu’européennes. They are African just as much as they are European. (Linguee.fr) Africaines and européennes are feminine and plural, but they (or maybe the relevant thing here is autant) don’t start with a consonant or h aspiré, so we have tout.
(Sorry, I haven’t been able to find good examples of a consonant-initial feminine plural adjective to show you (and myself) the contrast. Native speakers??)

tout-ce-que-vous-voulez-img_7086 — Tout ce que vous voulez: Everything you want. Picture source: me, on my way home this evening.

Feel like trying this out? You’re now ready for this quiz on the Français Facile web site. You can find a bunch more of them here. Want another take on all of this? See the Tex’s French Grammar site, which also has a nice little exercise at the end: https://www.laits.utexas.edu/tex/gr/det9.html. As the cartoons of my childhood would have put it: Th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks! Off to bed now, ’cause testing starts again first thing in the morning…

An apple sock, please

A chausson aux pommes–a sort of apple turnover. Picture source: me, waiting for the RER B at the Denfert-Rochereau train station.

One of the things that most amazes my American friends is that I don’t gain weight in France. The opposite–I lose it. This despite the fact that I feel free to eat delicious French stuff–being in France means that you don’t stuff yourself with it, and all of the walking that you do in Paris helps work it off. Case in point: I was up until 4 AM this morning studying the plus-que-parfait and the futur antérieur, so I’m running a bit late. That means that breakfast was a pastry grabbed at the kiosk in the train station. Happily, they had one of my favorites left–a sort of apple turnover.

Good morning–a chaussette aux pommes, please.

A chausson aux pommes? Sure.

Oh–it’s not an apple sock??

He laughed. I was happy to have made his day. By the end of the day, I had walked up innumerable steps in metro stations and hiked from the lab to the train. No problem with a little apple sock.

English notes

To make someone’s day: to have done something that will make them so happy that the whole day will feel good for them. When Clint Eastwood, pistol in hand, says go ahead–make my day, he means that shooting the bad guy would make him happy.

Eat, choke, and leave: how to pronounce toponyms

nevada-pronunciation-1-5590 — How to pronounce “Nevada.” Picture source: eventflags.com/Nevada-Decals-and-Magnets/

Part of running for president in the United States is that you have to travel around the country and visit places. While you’re there, you’re expected to do two things:

Eat whatever food is associated with the region or the immigrants who settled the region (with the exception of Native Americans, we’re all immigrants in this country) and appear to enjoy it.
Pronounce the name of the place that you’re in correctly.

This being the bizarre election cycle that it is, Trump chose instead, on a recent visit to Nevada, to get it backwards. Most Americans pronounce it Ne-VAH-da, but Nevadans pronounce it Ne-VA-da. That is: most Americans pronounce the middle vowel of Nevada with the vowel of hot, but the locals pronounce the middle vowel with the vowel of hat. Trump got it backwards—and made a big deal about it. My guess is that he did this in an attempt to draw the news coverage away from the fact that he had no clue what people were talking about when they asked him about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site, the hottest issue in Nevada politics. (Yes, Hillary knew what they meant.)

nevada-pronunciation-2-12536092l — How to pronounce “Nevada.” Picture source: nevadawolfshop.com

Place names are weird in America, and in France, too. It’s definitely not always possible to know how they’re pronounced by anyone, let alone by the locals, just by seeing the spelling. My home town’s Couch St.? It’s pronounced kooch. Mind you, we call a couch a couch, just like anyone else (unless it’s a sofa)–but, Couch St. is pronounced Kooch St. Macadam St.? No, it’s not Ma-CA-dam—it’s MA-cadam. In France? Forget it. Rennes is [ʁɛn] ( listen), which you could guess from the spelling, but Reims is [ʀɛ̃s] (^Écouter) , which I don’t think you can. Lille is [l i l] ^Écouter), which you could guess, but if you’re like me, you’ve wondered a thousand times if it’s supposed to be pronounced like fille. Of course, any French person would laugh their ass off at the pronunciation of the name of the city of Beaufort in South Carolina, which is totally different from the pronunciation of the name of the town of Beaufort in North Carolina. Do you pronounce the x at the end of deux, or aux, or peux? No. Do you pronounce the x at the end of Aix and Dupleix? Why, yes–you do.

nevada-pronunciation-t-shirt-photo-2 — How to pronounce “Nevada.” Picture source: oliviapiotter.wordpress.com/

Indeed, there has been plenty of press coverage about Trump insisting that Nevadans pronounce the name of their state his way, and it has drowned out the little bit of press coverage about what Nevadans actually seem to care about, which is Trump showing up in their state without having taken the time to find out what the issues of concern there. But, this being the bizarre election that it’s been, it’s hard to believe that any of this will affect anything. Are you an American? Get out there and vote, or you can’t really complain if you end up with a reality TV star for a president…

English notes:

to laugh one’s ass off: to laugh very hard. DO NOT use this in circumstances where you would not use bad language. Hey Steve, you want to hear a joke so funny you’ll laugh your ass off? Steve, tu veux entendre une blague super drôle tu seras péter de rire ? (Source: reverso.net) And you’re gonna laugh your ass off, ’cause it’s really freakin’ funny. Et vous allez vous péter de rire, parce c’est vraiment trop drôle. (Source: reverso.net) How it was used in the post: Of course, any French person would laugh their ass off at the pronunciation of the name of the city of Beaufort in South Carolina, which is totally different from the pronunciation of the name of the town of Beaufort in North Carolina.

French notes:

Apropos of nothing but my desire to make blogger Bea dM smile, here is a list of Italian place names, in French.

Go left, then right: faire la bise

I’m bald…et je suis gentil–I’m putting it nicely. The full version: I’m bald, fat, and old.

Nevertheless, every Tuesday morning I stop at Giorgio’s hair salon and take my seat in the chair. (I’m pretty sure that Giorgio is actually Georges, as his French is both Parisian and quite hip. A demen, he says to his employees as they head out the door at the end of the day–à demen.) The reason for my weekly visit: my hairdresser Nadine is helping me with my bise.

Kevin, she sneered, if you’re going to do la bise, you have to really do it. Apparently my air-kisses were too air and not enough kiss.

La bise is the French cheek-kiss that makes us Americans so incredibly uncomfortable. (Turnabout is fair play, and the American habit of hugging makes the French incredibly uncomfortable, so don’t feel like you’re at a cultural disadvantage here no matter which side of the Atlantic you’re from.) I ran into a French colleague at a conference a couple months ago. She was chatting with a bunch of French friends, so it made sense to faire la bise when we caught sight of each other. I did my best. Kevin, she sneered, if you’re going to do la bise, you have to really do it. Apparently my air-kisses were too air and not enough kiss. (This odd use of to sneer is explained in the English notes at the end of the post.)

Nadine has been happy to step in and help. After a few weeks, she was happy with my performance. “Ah, the French kiss,” she said after our exchange, clearly pleased with her didactic skills–in English. Now, Nadine doesn’t actually speak English, so I switched to French: Nadine, “French kiss” means something different in English. Oh, really? What? I explained. (See this post for how to say French kiss in French.) Oh–NO. Firm head-shake–there was no tongue in my future.

For me, the hardest part of la bise is remembering not to hug the person at the same time. That’s a big mistake–see this post for a story about just how awkward things can get if you forgot not to make that very American gesture. My current tactic: when I lean in for the kiss, I put my hands together behind my back. I imagine that it must look odd, but it’s better than the embarrassment of hugging when I oughtn’t. All in all, mind you, I find it a charming custom. Apparently not all foreigners do, though–here’s a clip from French Fried TV in which Paul Taylor complains in loud British English about all the bother. Subtitles in French. And, yes: the CombienDeBises.com web site is for real.

English notes below the video.

English notes

to sneer (something): to say while sneering. I believe that verbs like this, which are normally intransitive (that is, they don’t have an object) but can also be used for conveying what someone else said without a change in the tense of the original utterance, are called quotatives. (Compare “I screwed up that bise,” he said…where the person and tense of I screwed up doesn’t change, with He said that he screwed up that bise, where the person changes from I to he. English has an enormous number of verbs that don’t seem to have anything to do with speaking, but that can nonetheless be used in exactly this way. The wonderful children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth is packed with examples. How it was used in the post: Kevin, she sneered, if you’re going to do la bise, you have to really do it. Apparently my air-kisses were too air and not enough kiss.

The Wikipedia page on sneering is quite amusing, by the way. Want some more examples of this kind of bizarre quotative? Here you go, courtesy of Sketch Engine and the British National Corpus.

‘My Boticelli nymph,’ he smiled, slipping it behind her ear.
Ahem!’ he coughed. I’ll take more careful aim.
‘It’s all so unbelievable,’ he choked.

The quotatives that everyone likes to complain about are to be like and to be all.
I think they’re mostly American, but couldn’t swear to that. They’re characteristic of younger people. She was like, “I’m not kissing him!” He was all “well, I have baseball practice tonight.” You don’t have to use these, but you should recognize them when you hear them.

Trump and a blood-stained sheet: talking about confrontation and bullies in French

Bullies want to fight victims, not adversaries. –Bruce Tegner

When I was a kid, instructions for dealing with a bully were clear and unambiguous: fight him. Bullies deal in the currency of fear and intimidation, and what they told us is true: if you come at them, they will typically back down. My favorite Navy fight stories are not about fights–they’re about fights that didn’t happen, because I didn’t back down from a bully, and then he backed down from me. (This probably makes me sound like a badass. I’m not–I’m a total wimp. But, at some point, the possibility of being beaten shitless is a lot less painful than continuing to be bullied by some asshole.)

At this point in our bizarre election cycle, all of the talk is about confrontation. Last night was what the French press called the first passe d’armes between Clinton and Trump. I would guess that most of us turned on the TV to watch the debate with a fair amount of trepidation. What would Trump do? Would he literally beat his chest like a fucking gorilla? Would he lash out from the git-go? (This expression explained below in the English notes.) As it turned out, Clinton did what they told us to do when I was a kid: she got right in his face. She took the fight to him. Trump did what he’s done in the past when confronted with a woman who wouldn’t back down: he folded. (I’m thinking here of Carly Fiorina and the Rev. Faith Timmons.)

When I was a kid, everyone advised fighting bullies–parents, teachers, the world. In American schools today, kids who are involved in anything remotely resembling a fight are suspended from school, whether they initiated it, or they were attacked–see here, or here, or here for news stories about kids being thrown out of school for standing up to a bully.

How kids are supposed to deal with bullies under those conditions, I have no clue. I mean, I can read, so I know what the current advice is:

Reframe the problem of bullying. By changing your attitude towards bullying you can help regain a sense of control. Try to view bullying from a different perspective. (That’s Tip #2 from this page.)
Feel good about you. Nobody’s perfect, but what can you do to look and feel your best? Maybe you’d like to be more fit. If so, maybe you’ll decide to get more exercise, watch less TV, and eat healthier snacks. Or maybe you feel you look best when you shower in the morning before school. If so, you could decide to get up a little earlier so you can be clean and refreshed for the school day. (I think that’s what you call “blaming the victim.” I found that gem of anti-bullying here.)
It is incredibly important that you go through the appropriate reporting channels by firstly telling a teacher/parent/guardian/learning mentor or another responsible adult. (Anyone in the reading audience have success with this as a child? Found that one at the Ditch The Label site–they describe themselves as “one of the largest anti-bullying charities in the world.”)

…so, yes, I know what kids are told to do. But, what are kids supposed to do that might actually work? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure that “reframing the problem of bullying” would not have done much for the girl I was in the Navy with who our bully decided to go after one day by hanging up the sheets that she’d been sleeping on for her 24-hour stretch of ambulance duty so that it would be clear to the world that she was on her period.

Anyone know how kids are taught to deal with bullies in France? Surely it’s nothing this stupid…

French notes

un affrontement: confrontation, battle, clash. Premier affrontement musclé entre Hillary Clinton et Donald Trump (headline, RFI, https://goo.gl/2nLOUO) Affrontement Clinton-Trump: un débat qui devrait fracasser des records (headline, Huffington Post Québec, https://goo.gl/HTZMTX) L’affrontement entre les deux prétendants à la Maison-Blanche a été rude, avec dans le rôle du chœur les internautes et les médias (Le Temps, https://goo.gl/jRveH4)
une passe d’armes: échange énergique; sparring. #Trump2016 #Clinton Premières passe d’armes entre les deux candidats (TV5MONDE tweet) Vive passe d’armes. “Je ferai revenir nos emplois, vous ne pouvez pas le faire” – Trump. “Donald, vous vivez dans un monde à part” – Clinton (AFP USA, tweet) Première passe d’armes entre Clinton et Trump sur l’économie (headline, Libération)
la brute, le tyran: bully.
la brimade: bullying, baiting, vexation, aggravation. This is the title of the French Wikipedia page on bullying.

English notes

from the git-go: from the beginning. Here‘s a post about the expression from the Grammarphobia blog.

The English word bully can have other meanings besides brute or tyran. Here are some:

bully-beef-images — Canned or pickled beef. Thefreedictionary.com says that this comes from the French “boeuf bouilli.” Picture source: http://www.amazon.in/Bully-Beef-Biscuits-Food-Great/dp/1473827450

bully-sticks-in-dog-mouth-580x385 — Bully stick: dried animal penis, usually purchased for dogs to chew on. Picture source: http://bullystickshoppe.com/category/dogs/

750x400xthe-bully-pulpit-jpg-pagespeed-ic-p0-s37oj_ — The bully pulpit: a position, usually in public life, that gives you the ability to broadcast your views widely. Picture source: http://www.historynet.com/book-review-the-bully-pulpit.htm

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