Some thoughts on math, or why I'll never be an efficient waitress

My time in France has included two stints as a waitress, once in Paris, and once in Alba. In both places, the owners were my dear friends, and in both places, they teased me mercilessly about how slow I was at doing the checks, and how often I made mistakes.

They were right, and I was terrible, but I would like to take this opportunity to say that my problem was not mathematical, it was synesthetical.

People accept as a general truth that a nice thing about numbers is their universality.
And I am here to tell you, friends: that is one cruel misstatement of reality.

As a general rule, there's little difference in my head between French and English:
In both I can dream, swear, ruminate, babytalk, argue, bake, bargain, joke, gossip, and tease.

But hell if I can do math.

As long as I live, I will never be able get my head around the idea that
seven times eight (pictured up top)
and sept fois huit (pictured below)
both come out to 56.
How is that possible??
It will never, ever make sense to me.

Right there is the real reason I am self-employed: I can take all the time I need to make sure that cinquante-six and fifty-six really are the same thing. As you can see from the calculations pictured above, I'm still dubious.

Slippery words: goûter, doudou, and pique

 My husband, as I mentioned in an earlier post, once expressed his theory that language would eventually be boiled down to a single, highly expressive syllable, which he predicted would be bah. These are things you think about when you live in a bilingual household. Hard as you try, the one language begins to make incursions into the other; compression and spillage are inevitable.
This happens for a number of reasons. Some words get folded into your vocabulary because they are cultural institutions: goûter is not the same as "teatime," nor is it quite an "afternoon snack." My grandmother fed me goûters, never snacks, and that’s what they will always be to me. With other words, it’s because there’s no translation quite as convenient as the original: there's no good catch-all in English for doudou, the soft security objects children carry around and sleep with (blanky and teddy are rough translations, but they're too specific). If you have ever wondered why the French don’t make sense it’s because there’s no way to say that in French, although there is a growing movement in favor of “faire du sens.”
And then there are words that are just too tempting, too wonderfully versatile, to confine to just one language: "Ça pique!" is a good example. Its connotations are both positive and negative; among other things it can be spicy, prickly, pinchy, tickly, stabby, pokey, rancid, or bubbly; it may refer to a pepper, a beard, a cactus, a crawdad, a fork, a toothpick, a mosquito, a bed of nettles, a carbonated beverage, or bad wine.
Naturally, when our daughter was born I wondered how she would adapt to the separation and the spillage of bilingualism, how she’d deal with the cultural, the versatile, and the irreplaceable. Would she discover peekytoe crabs and think they are named that because their toes can pinch you? Would she be traumatized to discover that doudou, when you pronounce it with an American accent, becomes smelly and distasteful? 
So far, it’s hard to tell. She has a roughly equal number of words in French and English, which, right from the start, she acquired more or less at the same time – bain and bath, banane and banana, biberon and bottle: all of these she has boiled down to a single, highly expressive syllable, which, just as my husband predicted, is “bah.”

All manner of wild beasts

The French language is fond of many things.

Among them:

technical-sounding terms
and
nicknames.

Run-of-the-mill illnesses are a good example of this.

In English, my silence last week was due to
a stomach bug and a bad cold.

In French, I was afflicted with a gastro-entérite and a rhinopharyngite;

or, for short, I went to bed with a gastro and a rhino.

Either way, I'm in fine fettle now and almost ready to tell you about an exciting creature called
The Trappou.

Tricks of the trade

My grandfather was a translator and interpreter, too.

He worked for the United Nations and the International War Crimes Tribunal (in this picture you can see him at the Nuremberg trials; he's the third interpreter from the left).

He used to be the most punctilious person I knew.

He penciled corrections into the margins of his books
and drove me crazy when he'd pause a conversation to go look something up in the dictionary.

Now, he suffers from senile dementia,
and the pauses in our conversations
are longer
than the conversations themselves.
He no longer looks things up,
and he can't remember how to hold a pencil.

A few months ago, my mother cleaned out his apartment and gave me some of those dictionaries he used to drive me crazy with,
including the Historical Dictionary of the French Language
in its bright red case.
(Now of course, in large part due to my grandfather, I have developed my own punctilious dictionary obsession.)
When I set it on my desk, beside my other reference books, I wondered why on earth my grandfather had put little plastic flaps at the bottom of each volume.

They looked ugly, and I planned to remove them.
Then I sat down to work and reached for the dictionary,
at which point I understood that the flaps made it easy to flip the volumes in and out of their case - something I do all the time when I'm working.

Every time I see those flaps, I am moved in a dozen different ways. My grandfather may seem lost to me when I sit with him in the nursing home, but even now, he's got a few tricks left up his sleeve. No matter how far gone the people you love may seem, there's usually something left to learn from them if you look.

(Nuremberg photo credit: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Faux ami no. 3: Scotch and Scotch

If you look up “tape” in a bilingual dictionary it will tell you that the French say “ruban adhésif,” but if you ever find yourself in a situation like the one below, it’s good to know that’s not the word they use in real life.

The first time I ever stayed in my grandparents’ house in La Roche, my grandfather warned me to watch out for shady characters.

It was the summer after my sophomore year in college, and I was going to spend six weeks in La Roche with my friends Matt and Harry, and whoever else happened to wander through (Alba may be in the boonies, but you’d be surprised). The weeks went by and we didn’t see any shady characters, and I forgot all about my grandfather’s warning until one night Harry came into the kitchen and whispered to me that there were two people standing in the street with blackface on.

I was doing the dishes and wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. “What did you say?” I shut off the water and turned to face him. “Why are you whispering?”

“There are two people standing in the street with blackface on,” he repeated.

“Blackface?”

He nodded. “Down below the window. They have on black robes, they’re holding spears, they’ve got bones tucked into their belts, and they’re wearing blackface.”

“Bones?”

“Yes. Bones in their belts. Like some kind of tribal thing or something. Also knives. They’re stuck in the belts, too. They look like steak knives.”

Harry is a great raconteur, and I suspected him of pulling my leg, but steak knives seemed like the kind of detail you wouldn’t make up. “Are they druids?” I asked. I abandoned the dishes. “You’re making this up.”

“Why would I be making it up?” he asked. “People in the street with blackface? How would I even have thought of that?”

“How could you not be making it up?” I countered. “Blackface and robes and spears?”

“They asked me if I had any Scotch.”

“Any what?”

“Du scotch.” He imitated their accent.

“Why would they want Scotch? Are they drunk? Is it for some kind of ritual?”

Harry shrugged. “Ask them yourself.”

I remembered my grandfather’s warning. “Do they seem dangerous?”

Harry shrugged again. “Not really.”

I crept out of the kitchen and up to the window in the front room and peeked out. There were, as Harry had promised, two men in blackface leaning against the rampart walls below the house. The green streetlight cast eerie shadows over their faces, and their pale, knobby knees peeped out from knee-length black tunics tied at the waist with a piece of rope, which gleamed a little when the men moved. The steak knives, tied to their rope belts with string, were smudged with red.

It took me a second to realize that tunics were made from large plastic trash bags. Along with the knife, each man had a cardboard cutout of a bone stuck in the front of his belt. They also each had cardboard-tipped spears, one of which had lost its tip. I gave up hiding and stuck my head out the window to get a better look.

The one with the broken spear saw me. He waved hello. “Excusez-moi, est-ce-que vous auriez du Scotch, par hazard ?”

Matt had come over to the window, as well. “I don’t think we should give them any alcohol,” he whispered.

“For your spear?” I yelled down, and they nodded.

“Scotch like Scotch tape,” I said to Matt and Harry, in English. Someone went and found a roll of tape and we tossed it down to them.

The three of us stood at the window and watched them try and fix the cardboard point back onto the end of the spear handle. It wasn’t going very well. Even with several layers of scotch, the point flopped in a manner not really befitting a spear. It was a hot night, and their blackface was getting smeary from the exertion.

We got tired of being squished up at the window, and we went back out onto the terrace. “I want dessert,” Matt said. “Is there any more of that pudding?”

“Nope. Harry and I finished it yesterday.”

“Jerks.”

“We have Nutella,” I suggested. “And white wine.”

We agreed this would do in a pinch, and Harry went inside to fetch it. When he came back, he went and peered over the side of the terrace. He waved politely. “Ask them if they want some wine,” he said to me.

“Wine,” Matt said. “Wine –– why don’t you ask them what the hell they’re doing in our street at ten o’clock at night in blackface, for God’s sake.”

I sidled over to the terrace wall and looked down. They waved. “Want some wine?” I asked.

“Not with the kids,” said Droopy Spear.

“We’ve got to be in good shape for the kids,” Pointy Spear agreed.

I turned back to Matt and Harry. “They can’t drink because they’ve got to wait for the kids.”

“Are they going to do some human sacrifice?” Harry inquired.

I turned back to the guys in the street. “What kids?”

“At the summer camp in Aubignas,” Droopy Spear explained. “We always bring the kids over to Alba and do a scavenger hunt with them.”

I related this to Matt and Harry.

“Ask them when their Birth of a Nation reenactment is,” Matt said.

“A scavenger hunt in costume?” I asked, not sure how to broach the whole blackface issue.

“You know, an African princess gets kidnapped, and the kids have to go all over Alba and la Roche and ask questions, to find out who did it,” said Pointy Spear, as if he were going over the rules of Simon Says with a mental patient.

“We’re the king’s guards,” Droopy Spear added. “They can only ask us yes or no questions.”

We heard footsteps clattering down the street, and Droopy Spear hid the Scotch tape and snapped to attention. A group of kids and with a bored-looking counselor straggled to stop in front of the guards, and we ducked behind the wall of the terrace.

“Those aren’t real bones,” a kid said.

“QUIET!” Droopy Spear thundered. “WHO GOES THERE?”

The kids giggled. “Where’s the princess?”

“You may ask yes or no questions.”

“Why is there blood on your knife?”

“You may ask yes or no questions,” pointy spear repeated.

“Where is the king?”

“You may––”

“Remember, the king’s dead, we just found out,” the bored counselor reminded them.

“Ask them since when it’s okay to wear blackface,” said Matt.

“That’s not a yes or no question,” Harry pointed out.

“Is the princess with you?”

“No.”

“Have you seen the princess today?”

“Yes.”

Droopy spear cleared his throat.

It shall ever thus be told

what some bad men will do for gold.

The king is dead, the princess gone,

In this plot she is a pawn.

Before the young girl’s life’s cut short,

Look for her inside the fort.

Silence. "What is that supposed to mean?”

“The fort,” the counselor sighed. Silence. She pointed up the hill. “You know, like a castle,” she added.

The kids clattered off towards Alba’s castle. Before we had time to say anything else, Droopy Spear and Pointy Spear had packed up their arsenal, shouted goodbye, and disappeared into the shadows beyond the rampart walls.

I have lived in Alba on and off for many years now, and though I have encountered more than a few scorpions, I never saw those two young men again. So if ever you’re in the Ardèche and you run across someone in blackface, would you do me a favor and ask for my tape back? And please, for the sake of the kids, don’t give them anything to drink.

French vocabulary nos. 2 and 3: faux ami and quid pro quo

Translated literally, faux ami means “false friend”:

it’s a word you ought to be able to snap like a Lego

out of English

and into French

(or vice versa)

but you can’t.

One false friend that still occasionally trips me up is “isolation,”

which means “insulation” and not “isolation.”

If, when describing Alba to a Frenchman, you mention the "isolation," he may start thinking about

fiberglass versus cellulose and thermal coefficients

as you try to conjure a solitary village perched on a hill, looking out over endless rows of grapevines.

Of course, insulation can be a confusing topic even when you’re not worried about translation –

or maybe I should say that translation can be a problem even within a language.

I’m thinking of what the French call a quid pro quo, which, as it happens, is another example of a faux ami.

In Latin, quid pro quo means “this for that.”

In English, it denotes a tit-for-tat exchange.

In French, it is what tends to occur when you bring together the two main populations of Alba,

the good ol’ boy set

and the organic-crunchy-yuppie set.

At a recent party, we overheard Rafael,

who is a builder,

chatting

with Daniel, who quit his office job to move to the country and build straw bale houses.

“Straw bales are the future,” Daniel enthused. “Have you read much about them?”

“Not sure exactly you’d need to read about them,” said Rafael.

“That’s how I feel,” Daniel exclaimed. “It’s what’s so great – they’re just intuitive.”

“I guess so,” said Rafael.

“The only thing you really need to know about straw bales,” Daniel observed, taking a gulp of his artisanal beer, “is that you have to be careful not to pack them too tightly.”

Rafael poured himself another pastis. “Uh-huh,” he said.

“Because if you pack them too tightly,” Daniel went on, “the straw gets crushed, and then you lose the hollow part in the stem that holds the air, and it’s not as effective.”

Rafael took a long, thoughtful sip of pastis. “Well I wouldn’t worry too much,” he said. “You know, you bale it, you roll it, you stack it, I don’t think your animals are gonna be that picky – if it’s straw, they’ll eat it.”

The Densest Object in the World

Today it is time for a cautionary tale about a little detail that might trip you up as you toggle between numbers in French and English.

Once upon a time, shortly after I moved to France for good to live with the man I would later marry, the postman delivered a little blue envelope to our house. It contained a blue, handwritten square of paper with the following information on it:

I arrived: March 31, 2005 at 11:30pm

I weigh: 3,650 kg

I measure: 52 cm

You may visit me on Sunday, April 9, between 9am and noon.

There was no signature. It was some kind of party invitation, but who would have a party on a Sunday morning?

And who would couch the invitation as a riddle?

I had never heard of anything that dense.

Was it an asteroid?

Surely I would have heard of an asteroid landing near our village. It would have made a big hole, too.

Besides, only quarks and stuff are dense like that. You can’t even see them.

This is ridiculous, I thought.

No one is going to come to their party.

I tossed the invitation on the table and forgot about it until my husband came home. “Any mail?” he asked.

“Just this stupid riddle,” I said, handing him the blue piece of paper. As I passed it to him, I noticed there was something on the back of it. It was a picture of a newborn baby, whose birth his parents and grandparents were very happy to announce.

“Ah, Fred had his baby,” Julien said, tossing the birth announcement back on the table. “I guess we should buy them a present. What do you mean, riddle?”

And that is why you should never forget that the French use commas where Americans use decimal points, and vice versa.

Never a dull moment

While looking around for a good translation for the French verb "deciller" (which, literally, means "to make someone regain his lucidity") I learned that "ciller" means "to sew shut the eyelids of a bird of prey for training purposes." (The little guy to your right does not approve.)

And there, again, is the tragedy of translation - no matter how I translate that word (which occurs in the context of a book about social dialogue in the EU), the connotation of a falcon with its eyes sewn shut will be lost forever.

My only comfort is that it's such a rare word in French that I think the nuance is lost on most French readers, too...

Words, words, words

Friends, it's been a while.
We've had a baby, moved to the Ardèche, and bought a house to restore. I've started work on a new book.
I hereby announce that I will be keeping you apprised of the progress of our house, and of my musings about words, and possibly of the vicissitudes and lassitudes (as Romain Gary once said) of life in the country. Stay tuned...

Here's the new house, which is very, very old.