A while ago I mentioned how French make the distinction between Paris and the rest of the country. On top of that, there’s a tendency to discriminate between the Hexagon and the world beyond it. French culture is naturally assumed to be the beacon of Western civilization. And to be honest, they have a point there. To an extent.
While it’s one thing to mock the infatuation with food & drinks culture here (ie don’t, because you come across like an ass), it’s enjoyable to watch a local squirm with a mix of righteousness, anger and a frail self-consciousness when arguing the relative merits of French vs New World wines. And while it’s undoubtedly true that France has enriched world culture with its great arts, this high quality does not extend to French ‘humor’ – which is not so much untranslatable as it is unpalatable.
But one thing that really makes me smile time and time again is when we are speaking in English and my partner pauses to think mid-sentence, and then resumes with the words “I’m sorry, but I don’t know this word in English” and then uses an English word right away. Examples of this are: pistache, bizarre, apricot, copy, labyrinth, massage, and prolonge. I keep a list of this and jot them down whenever they come across.
When I mentioned that the English word for ‘bizarre’ is also ‘bizarre’, the response was confusion, and when I followed that up by saying that English actually has a larger vocabulary than French, the look quickly changed to something in-between indignation and pity. Because surely no other languages have the breadth and the depth of French? Though to be honest English does itself no favors in their eyes with the complete absence of structured grammar and the gratuitous usage of swear words.
After two long weeks stuck in my apartment, tomorrow I will finally venture back out into the world. I’ve been forewarned that now that summer is over, the metro is jam-packed and wildly uncomfortable. I for one am looking forward to regular, continuous human interactions, and surely more metro stories and swear words. To conclude, here’s one photo to commemorate a very enjoyable first summer in Paris.
