I hit something hard and crunchy when I bit into my croissant this morning. It was a dark brown chocolate bar stuck in the middle of the pastry. Zuts alors, the lovely redheaded boulanger’s wife had mistakenly given me a croissant “au chocolat” instead of a croissant “beurre.”The two types of croissant look identical and you can only tell them apart by their delicious names.
It made me think about words and the great French writer Gustave Flaubert, who wrote Madame Bovary. Flaubert was known as a slow writer because he spent a lot of time searching for the “bon mot,” for just the right word. He’d take weeks writing a single paragraph over and over. He wanted to find that one word that once in its place would fit so perfectly that the sentence would become simply unchangeable. Just perfect.
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| A young Gustave Flaubert circa 1850-60 |
His efforts produced some of the finest novels ever written. As an artist he struggled with his words because he understood that even ordinary words contain powerful implications and textures.
And this isn’t an “out there” idea. I think that names and words are always affecting our ordinary lives. Here’s a very simple example of what I mean. I ran out of Q-Tips today. I had brought a couple of dozen with me from the States but now they were all used up.
So I put Q-Tips on my shopping list and later in the day went off the supermarket. When I got there I realized I had no idea what the damn things were called in French.
I asked one of the supermarket staff,” S’il vous plait. Ou est les Queue Teeeps?” She stared at me for a moment with that “Oh, Monsieur is a moron from space” look in her eyes and shrugged.
Left alone I began to think to myself, “If I were a French Q-Tip what would I be called?”
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| English creeping into France |
Having no good answer to this deep question, I simply began a methodical aisle by aisle search of the store. Starting in first aid products working my way through shampoos, air fresheners, soaps, toothpaste, skin crèmes and finally makeup. Nothing. I moved on to tissues and paper supplies and was about to give up when there on a bottom shelf, half hidden by bags of cotton pads, I saw a familiar blue packages. There were the Q-Tips or as the package called them in French “bâtonettes ouatés.”
“Bâtonettes ouatés” translates as “little sticks of cotton wool.” Now that’s a lovely name for Q-Tips. Bâtonettes! That works for me because Q-Tips absolutely look like drum majorette batons, scaled down for mice.
And this was a very Flaubert moment because it points out how French differs from English in subtle ways.
Look at “Q-Tips,” it is a very sterile name, very impersonal and industrial. Do we even know what the Q stand for? Bâtonettes ouatés on the other hand is descriptive of what the item is and has a sweetness to it.
There are other examples. In America we drive cars. Drive has a pushy sound to it like driving a herd of cattle over the edge of a cliff. In France one “conduire le voiture” or conducts the car. You escorting the car get to a place, much gentler than driving.
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| Give way |
At traffic roundabouts signs here say “cedez le passage” which means “give way” as opposed to the American “Yield!” The French are struggling as English slips into their language. When new things come along they try to create new French words that retain a descriptive quality, a French identity.
For instance, since email means enamel in French they’ve taken the words for electronic mail--courrier electronique—and shortened them to courriele. A word with rolling Rs that’s not quite as corporate and hard as email. I like this softness in the language as much as I like the way the French find workarounds to get along.
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| More english in France |
Flaubert wanted to write realistic novels devoid of the flowery language and “higher emotions” of the literature of his day. In his search for the bon mot he created works that soar with emotive power and that shaped the French language forever.
I’d like to think that not so long age someone who had read and loved Flaubert had been the one to give Q-Tips a French name of bon mots like bâtonettes ouatés.
Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer
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