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ah voh maark! Pray? Paar-TAY! Click below to hear this.*
On your marks, get set, go!
Regardless of what the phonetic respelling looks like, this is not an invocation to pray and then party wildly!
In honor of my cousin who is watching a Belgian bicycle race, my niece who is watching a Daytona race, and all of us who are making a dash for the best sofa cushion to watch the Oscars, this is what you say before the starter gun is fired.
There are several versions in English. My childhood version was Ready, set, go! Others say Get ready, get set, go! or Ready, steady, go! It’s interesting (in a useless sort of way) to note that the middle term never appears to be a question in the English versions, whereas in the French it is normally punctuated as a question. There is no deep psychological or cultural explanation for this. It just is.
There are only two ways in which this expression may change. The first is if all the racers are female. In that case, you would have to ask Prêtes?, using the feminine form of the adjective. Pronounce it /prett/.
The second is if there is only one racer, say a runner on a training run. Then you would say À votre marque! Prêt(e)? Partez!, which sounds a little odd. You can never say à tes marques, because that would presuppose one racer taking several marks. And you don’t say sur vos marques, either, just because à is the correct preposition for this usage.
And may the best TV snacks win!
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
ohr vwaar, maad-mwah-ZELL! Click below to hear this.*
Good-bye, Miss!
It’s earth-shaking news, really! The French government is dropping the use of mademoiselle on official forms. This is the same as if the US government were to declare that official forms may not ask what form of address you prefer: no Mrs., no Miss, no Mr.
Of course, no one can stop the public from saying it. Cultural habits die hard, and this one is strongly ingrained. In France, if you don’t know a person’s last name, you just use titles–Monsieur for men, Madame or Mademoiselle for women. You enter a mom-and-pop store: you say Bonjour, Messieurs-Dames! You receive your train ticket at the window: Merci, Madame! Someone asks you if you speak English: Oui, Mademoiselle!
That’s why this is big news. Here’s the link to the New York Times article It’s in English. Want to guess how many generations it will take before mademoiselle disappears entirely from the language?
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
Or, as we also say in English, without a score. How a piece of printed or handwritten music acquired the name of score in English, I can’t explain. It’s nothing to do with keeping score!
But in French, it’s quite clear. It’s une partition, which comes from the Latin word meaning to divide. Have you ever looked carefully at a musical partition? If you haven’t been trained in reading music, even a simple hymn can be confusing.
Now consider, say, a symphony. Each group of instruments in the orchestra has its own line to follow: first violins, second violins, first violas, second violas, all the way through the strings, the woodwinds, the brass, and the percussion. It may take a single page for just a couple of measures.
So la partition contains all the notes of the entire piece, written in such a way that you can read vertically to see who is playing what at the same time. Or you can read horizontally, and see what one instrument is playing–the oboes, for example. It is the piece of music, divided into all its parts. Most conductors and many other skilled musicians can actually hear all these notes in their head when they read the score, a feat which I find beyond impressive.
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
luh kawt day kawt dew kawt. Click below to hear this.*
The Tale of the Count’s Accounts
Il y avait une fois un comte qui comptait gagner beaucoup d’argent. Il a ouvert un compte en banque pour y économiser son argent. Chaque soir il comptait l’argent touché de la journée, et chaque matin il déposait cette somme à la banque, dans son compte de dépôt.
Un jour le comte s’est rendu compte que le compte de banque se vidait, au lieu de se remplir, au fur et à mesure qu’il déposait ses fonds. « Il y a un trou dans mon compte ! s’est-il exclamé. Mon argent s’enfuit ! Il faut stopper la fuite ! »
Il se rend à la banque, explique le problème à un employé de la banque, qui explique à son tour que les comptes ne sont pas comme un bac ou un seau et qu’ils ne peuvent pas avoir de trous.
Le comte n’y comprend rien. Il ouvre un nouveau compte, et commence à verser ses nouveaux fonds dans le nouveau compte. Rien n’y fait : après quelques semaines, c’est la même chose.
Le comte conte son affaire à son avocat. « Mais… on a truqué les comptes ! s’exclame l’avocat. Je vais trouver le coupable ! Versez-moi un acompte, pour faire les frais de mon investigation.
–Je compte sur vous, dit le comte. »
Ayant reçu le chèque du comte, l’avocat s’en va à la banque. Il dépose le chèque dans son propre compte, compte ses sous, et va chez l’agence de voyages. Il prend deux billets pour les îles, se rend chez lui, et raconte sa bonne fortune à sa femme. Ils font leurs valises tout de suite, car, dit l’avocat, « Il n’y a pas un moment à perdre. Chaque minute compte.
–En effet, cher ami, répond sa femme. D’ici 12 heures, je compte me reposer sur la plage. Le comte ne saura jamais comment ses comptes se sont vidés. »
FIN
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
aw naa-vay trew-kay lay KAWT. Click below to hear this.*
The books had been cooked Someone had cooked the books.
We don’t know who the scoundrel is, but someone in the company “doctored” the accounts. No doubt that person is long gone, enjoying life on a beach somewhere in the sun.
Note that in French, you’re not actually cooking the books. That’s what happens when you drop your livre de cuisine(cookbook) into the boeuf bourguignon. No one keeps “books” anymore in any case. The financial records reside in a computer, and are called les comptes: accounts.
As for the verb tense in this sentence, it’s the pluperfect, or plus-que-parfait (which translates as “more than perfect”). In this case, perfect has nothingf to do with superiority. It’s related to the Latin factus, which means done. The perfect tense expresses an action that is done, finished; the plus-que-parfait expresses an action that was done before another action was done.
In practical terms, that means–in a story we can imagine around this sentence–that the disappearance of various files from the office and the odd behavior of a key employee lead to the discovery that someone had cooked the books. On avait truqué les comptes.
Truquer, by the way, has nothing at all to do with cooking, unless you are slipping spinach into your fussy eater’s spaghetti sauce. It means to fiddle, alter, trick.
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
slee-vray ah-nwee-yuh kum lah plWEE. Click below to hear this.*
This book is as dry as dust.
We have some books like that. We rescued them from boxes in the basement, and Isabella the Dog loves chewing their corners. She really fancies the dusty taste of old books and their covers.
We have some of the other kind, too. The ones that are so dull, they put you to sleep. Who wants to read them?
The funny thing is that they are not dry at all, in French. They’re rather soggy, actually. That’s because we say they are ennuyeux comme la pluie–as boring as rain. I’m looking out at a gray Chicago winter day and thinking, yup, that’s dull. And since another meaning for ennuyeux is annoying, let’s add that to the list.
So those books that are as dry as dust in English are all wet in French. Oops, sorry, bad pun!
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
In English, this calls to mind jugglers and magicians. In French, it conjures up marital spats with broken plates crashing around one’s ears. That’s because of the word coup, whose primary meaning is a blow or hit. But le coup lives in so many expressions that it practically needs a different translation for each one.
In this case, it’s a trick, because the plate is being used to create an optical illusion. French blogger Olavia wrote recently about the trick of putting your food on a smaller plate to make it look as if you have more food than you really do. You can find her post at this link.
She includes a link to the full news story, as reported in Le Point, about an American study that found it’s not only plate size that matters. The greater the contrast in color between the food itself and the plate and the tablecloth, the less we tend to eat. The whole idea is to give the food center stage, while making the background disappear. That’s le coup de l’assiette! And if you want to jump directly to that story, find it here.
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
I thought of this last night, as I was on my way…to the movies. If you don’t belong to the Twitter generation, you may be wondering, Is it some kind of code?
Yes, in fact, it is! Since Twitter only allows 140 characters (including spaces and punctuation, mind you) for your message, people get very creative about abbreviating. The sentence above, in “real” French, is Je vais au ciné: 16 characters counting the period at the end of the sentence, compared to 11. Five extra characters, what a bonanza! Keep in mind too that ciné has long been a spoken abbreviation for cinéma. In this case, numbers and letters of the alphabet stand in for identically-pronounced syllables.
Why would anyone want to do this? Some would say, because it’s a fast way to exchange brief thoughts with friends or, if you choose, the whole wide world. I say, because it’s fun. If you consider it a word puzzle, it becomes an enjoyable mental challenge, in English or in French. Spk Frnch!
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
zhuh vay fair day pum duh tay rah shMEEZ. Click below to hear this.*
I’m going to make boiled potatoes with the skins on.
I’m planning dinner, so of course I have to think about the menu! Everyone loves potatoes, but how to fix them?
Apparently, I am going to have to stitch up tiny clothes for them. Françoise was serving pommes de terre en chemise the other evening (in shirts). Here’s a recipe in one of my French cookbooks for pommes de terre en robe des champs(in field dresses). And American cookbooks will tell you how to cook potatoes in their jackets.
Well, my sister, Jean, is the one who knows how to sew, so I’ll leave that to her. Let’s talk about food instead.
As it turns out, all the tiny clothing is really a fanciful name for the skin: potatoes cooked first and peeled later. If you want to cook them the French way, scrub them first, but don’t break the skins. Salt the boiling water generously and then plunge the potatoes in. You will have to cook them by the clock; if you poke them to test for doneness, they will burst. You can fish one out on a spoon and press it very gently with your fingers; if it gives a little, it is probably done. Serve them hot with their skins, and offer butter, crème fraîche, or sour cream on the side. Those are des pommes de terre en robe des champs or en chemise.
The odd thing to me is that in the three French cookbooks that I own, only one even mentions the possibility of putting a potato in the oven to cook it. Françoise says that her Belgian childhood featured boiled potatoes rather than any other kind. (Preferably en raclette, but that’s another story.) My American childhood featured baked potatoes,pommes de terre au four(in the oven) with crunchy, chewy skins buttered on the inside and eaten separately. Either way, delecious!
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
eel suh saw say-ray lah MAA. Click below to hear this.*
They shook hands.
Today is a lesson in nuances and nitpicky rules. Every language has some! That’s what drives language learners crazy.
You may already know that when you put a reflexive verb into the passé composé–the compound past–you have to make the past participle agree with the subject. If that sounds like gibberish, let’s go with an example: Ils se sont serrés.Serrer means to press or squeeze. Ils se sont serrés means They squeezed each other. A big bear hug comes to mind.
A reflexive verb is always conjugated with être in the passé composé. This makes the participle look like an adjective. It isn’t really, and that’s not the technical reason why you have to make the agreement, but that fact can help you remember to do it.
But there’s an exception, and today’s phrase is an example of it. When the reflexive verb (se serrer) has a direct object, you don’t make the agreement. That’s because the action is deflected away from the subject, and onto the object.
So when we say Ils se sont serré la main, they are no longer squeezing each other, but squeezing hands. And since la main comes after the verb, no agreement is made.
Which brings us to another point: Why do we say se serrer la main in French when we shake hands in English? That’s a cultural issue, not a grammatical one (I can hear your sigh of relief!). French people don’t shake hands. They grasp each other’s hand firmly, pump once, and let go. You don’t keep shaking up and down, up and down, and you don’t hang on. The only hard part about that is remembering how to do it.
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
Or open air, or country air, or fresh air. It makes no difference what we call it. The fact is, spending a day in the great out-of-doors does make a person hungry, whether you’ve been plowing the fertile earth or flying kites. In French, it’s called le grand air,big air, which seems fitting to me because the sky feels so vast and wide-open.
As for the hungry part, hunger never gets mentioned in the French expression. Fresh air digs, that is, it hollows out a space in your middle. I’ll bet you can feel how right this expression is just by hearing it, especially if you are reading this around mealtime. And watch the pronunciation: creuse does not rhyme with cruise. Listen to the sound file to get it right.
Which reminds me… I have to go get ready to go out. It’s just about dinner time.
Oh! Before I head out the door: Don’t forget that linking the final d of grand turns the sound from silent (grand by itself is /grah/, with a nasal /ah/ but no final consonant) to a /t/ sound. Okay, wish me bon appétit! It’s the polite thing to say when you know someone is heading off to eat.
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
I know you’re thinking this is odder than most of the phrases I feed you. Let me explain.
Some 44 years ago, I was living in France for a year of graduate studies. I ate most of my meals in the student restaurant, but I bought my few groceries at the épicerie du coin, the corner grocery store. Most of the time, the shop owner grated my cheese, handed my jelly and a couple of pots of yoghurt over the counter, selected a tomato for me.
One day, I was waited on by a sad-looking and somewhat sullen teenager, maybe 14 or so. She gathered my purchases on the counter, but when I pulled out my wallet to pay, she yelled unceremoniously towards the back room: Marraine…j’encaisse?
The grocer-lady contented herself with shouting back an affirmative, whereupon the girl made my change and stashed my bill in the cashbox.
So now I knew the relationship between the girl and the woman. I had to go home to look up encaisser. I could see what it meant, but I had never heard the word before.
It made sense. Since une caisse can be either a cashbox or a cash register or even a checkout lane, encaisser simply means to take in money. Cash or check (or probably even credit card, though they were not nearly so widely used at the time), no difference.
But by extension, it can also mean to take in all sorts of other things. Not sewing or laundry, but blows, scoldings, rude comments, compliments…. It implies that you accept what comes your way, without any particular reaction. It’s not necessarily making a poker face (see this link from the other day); it’s more like absorbing. It’s what Mary, the mother of Jesus, famously did, as reported in Luke 2:19.
As I stowed my groceries in my little rented room that day, I thought: that girl seems to have encaissé more than my money.
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
aa-rett duh fraw-say lay soor-SEE! Click below to hear this.*
Stop frowning!
If you want to read about les sourcils, go back to this post from the other day. I have other things I want to talk about today.
Did you know that this French verb originates from sewing vocabulary? Well, it does. Froncer means to pleat, or to gather up with a sewing needle into folds. (Did you also know that pleat comes from the French word for to fold–plier?)
And where did froncer originate? That’s from an ancient Frankish word, hrunkja, which meant wrinkle. (I know, it sounds more like the name of a tractor or a fake-Scandinavian ice cream.)
When you frown, you “pleat” your eyebrows, or wrinkle them. (In English, you can also “knit” your brows.) Remember how your mother (or the kids on the playground) used to tell you if you made faces, your face would stick that way? Actually, they were right. If you frown a lot, you will have frown lines, or wrinkles, between your eyebrows. Trust me on this one. Since wrinkles are inevitable, you may as well exercise some choice as to where they locate. Smile. You will have wrinkles you don’t feel self-conscious about, and everyone will see you as a happy person.
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
eel nah pah soor-see-YAY. Click below to hear this.*
He didn’t bat an eyelash.
Actually, in French, it’s a whole eyebrow. It’s hard to bat just one eyelash, anyway, and eyebrows don’t “bat”.
Un cil (/seel/) is an eyelash.Un sourcil (/soor-SEE/, without pronouncing the l–don’t ask me why) is an eyebrow. That sour- is an old form of sur, on or above, from the Latin super.
So sourciller appears to mean simply to do something with the eyebrows. Eyebrows don’t do much, anyway. They go up, down, and in towards your nose. This word generally refers to raising eyebrows.
But if you are playing poker or being interrogated by the police or trying to tell your teacher the dog ate your homework, you don’t want your eyebrows to twitch, not even a tiny little bit, not in any direction. If you succeed, we will get to say Il/Elle n’a pas sourcillé about you. Impressive trick.
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
eel sah nay zhuh-tay uh day-reeYAIR lah krah-VAAT. Click below to hear this.*
He tossed one down.
One what? A glove? The gauntlet? A wrestling opponent? A poker chip?
None of the above! This guy is drinking. Alcohol, to be specific. And the implication is that he is either doing it to give himself courage (before meeting the future father-in-law, or before facing the boss) or he is doing it at inappropriate times (at work, on the road).
Not behavior to be commended, of course. But the fun lies in the French. Literally: He threw one (of them) behind his tie. That’s even better than down the hatch, which could be another English rendition of this expression. Can’t you just see the whiskey slithering down his esophagus? It’s like a cartoon diagram in a commercial for heartburn meds, or a kindergarten lesson on “Your Body”. And the expression applies even on casual Fridays. There doesn’t have to be a literal tie.
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
taid moh-vay pwah loh-zhoor-DWEE! Click below to hear this.*
You’re in a bad mood today!
It sounds like a bad hair day! But as usual, it’s not what you think. Un poil is indeed a hair, but not the kind that gets left in the sink making graceful curves. It’s the kind that grows on your arms and legs, in your beard and mustache, and also the kind that your dog leaves all over the furniture.
The hair that grows on top of your head, on the other hand, is les cheveux, not to be confused with <les chevaux, which are horses. Les chevaux don’t have des cheveux, they have des poils.
So if you brush your dog’s or cat’s fur the wrong way, they don’t like it, do they? That will put any animal in a bad mood. That’s what today’s expression is all about. The cause is something else (“He just rubs me the wrong way”, for example). The effect is your bad mood, which leads me to comment, T’es (slang for tu es) de mauvais poil aujourd’hui!
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
mah noo-vell sho-deeYAIR. Click below to hear this.*
My new furnace.
A thing of beauty, don’t you think? Well, if you’re into heavy metal, anyway. So to speak. We had to get a new one because the old one, at 25 years, gave up the ghost.
So this is une chaudière,a boiler, so named because it used to be basically a gigantic pot full of water, heated up over a wood fire. Nowadays, it’s a marvel of electronics, shiny new ductwork, a natural gas feed, and a fan so quiet that I hardly know it’s running.
The whole system is called le chauffage central,central heating. It makes the whole house chaude. (That’s feminine, because la maison is feminine.)
You may wonder why the adjective chaud and the noun chaudière have a d in them, while the noun chauffage and the verb chauffer(to heat)have an f. That’s because the former were born from the Latin caldera, a pot or kettle for heating things in, while the latter come from Latin califacio, make warm. The consonant in the middle, at the “hinge” of the word, makes the difference.
And another thing about that chaudière: That’s where the English word chowder comes from, which beats a pot of hot water any day no matter which flavor you choose.
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
Or literally, I’m going to reset the clocks (put them back on time).
As usual, you may wonder, how did we get from here (a misunderstanding, perhaps) to there (clocks)?
We don’t think much about our clocks anymore, except twice a year when we change from standard to daylight time and back. Even then, some of our clocks reset themselves automatically, since they are connected to the internet.
An old pendulum clock, on the other hand–like this one that was a wedding gift to my grandparents in 1914–needed daily or weekly winding. You would make the rounds of the house, attending to the clock in each room. My great-grandfather wound this one every Saturday night at exactly midnight, I am told.
Not only that. Clocks like this had to be leveled with absolute precision, or the pendulum would swing unevenly and the clock would stop. The weight on the pendulum had to be adjusted up or down at times, if the clock was gaining or losing time.
And you couldn’t just twirl the hands randomly to the right hour or minute. My clock is designed to strike every quarter-hour. If you didn’t move the hands in exactly the right way, you would end up with a clock that struck 4:15 at 7:30.
Alas, I was careless with my clock, and it no longer strikes–nor even runs. It reads a permanent 4:30, to my great sadness.
That happens with relationships sometimes, too. If we don’t handle them with the care they deserve, they can run wrong or break. And it can be a lot of work to fix them, to set things straight again. Valentine’s Day is coming. Be nice to your friends, your family, and your clocks.
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
I love this word! It is so much fun to say. It works whenever you have already said hello, but you find yourself seeing or communicating with the same person again in a short period of time. But it only works on the same day!
For instance, you greeted your teacher as she walked into the classroom: Bonjour, mademoiselle! Later in the day, you see her in the hall or in the lunchroom. Rebonjour!
Or you emailed a distant colleague about a project. Maybe you opened your email with Bonjour, Jean-Pierre! An hour or two later, you have another question. Rebonjour!
Note that when you are speaking, you have to replace the name or title of the person, if you’re not going to say it again. The way you do that is to draw out the last syllable. In French, each syllable is normally given the same length and the same amount of stress, like a metronome or a ticking clock. Changing that rule is a stylistic tool, for giving emphasis or for indicating that something is missing. So you say /ruh-baw-ZHOOOR/…but don’t drag it out a lot, or you will lose the purity of the vowel sound.
Here are the two greetings, side by side, so you can hear the difference:
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here are alternative links to the two audio files:
aw vah ruh-koh-zaid SAH. Click below to hear this.*
We’ll chat about that again.
How is it that causer can have acquired two such different meanings as to cause and to chat?
The connection is interesting, and obvious once you think about it for a moment. The Latin word causa means a cause or a trial. And cause has a double meaning, too: the reason why something. happens, and the issue you care about enough to engage in an argument.
To have a trial, you need an argument. To have an argument, you need issues or reasons to get upset. The argument involves talking–and so does the trial. You talk it out, and someone helps to bring about a decision.
So, while causer looks like and can mean to cause, in this expression it means to chat. What makes it all the more intriguing is that an argument (going back to the legal angle) is contentious, a chat is friendly and casual.
Of course, the English word again is here rendered by the French prefix re-.
When should you use this expression? It’s very useful when lunchtime is over and you need to get back to the office. It’s a way to write “to be continued” at the bottom of the page. It’s less useful when you need to chew out your teenager for breaking curfew or denting the family car. It’s too friendly to be spoken through clenched teeth.
*Some mobile phones, such as Blackberries, won’t display the audio player. If no player appears, here’s an alternative link to the audio file:
