The verb franchir means to go across some limit, either a physical obstacle like a wall or gate, or a metaphorical boundary like a city line or national frontier. It can also mean to break some social norm, or cross some notable threshold like a $100 a barrel for oil.
The verb affranchir means to give someone or something their independence, to free a serf, or a slave, or a colony. The reflexive form s’affranchir can also mean to free oneself of a constraining condition – fear of flying, or living according to societal norms.
When I was researching the meaning of the word un machin yesterday, I came upon a video by an outfit called Français Authentique. They have a YouTube channel with many, many videos, largely about learning French as it is spoken informally among friends and family. I listened to an hour’s worth of them during my morning walk today and really enjoyed them.
As far as I can tell, it’s a one-man operation that Johan Tekfak has been running for 10 years. On the website he sells self-published educational materials (audio recordings, written exercises, etc.) as well as live group classes run over video conference. He seems to be in the process of expanding to a larger online education platform, that integrates social media, discussion forums and interactive exercises.
But the YouTube channel is what interests me today. It offers several hundred short videos, all in French, ranging in length from one to twenty minutes. The ones I’ve watched are from two playlists, Vidéos courtes and T’as 5 minutes? Each video in these lists reviews the proper usages of a handful of words or expressions. They’re also available as Podcats. I plan to listen to a whole bunch more — good lightweight listening to accompany walks.
Here’s some of the expressions that I’ve heard presented. From the “Shorts” series:
piger is a familiar way of saying comprendre, “to understand”. «Je n’ai rien pigé» = I’m totally lost.
c’est du lourd means “that’s awesome”, “that’s high quality”.
s’éclater means “enjoy immensely” or “take great pleasure in”. It has nothing to do with éclater, which is “to explode”.
Allez! is an ordinary conjugation of the verb “to go”, but the video calls out four significations of this interjection: “Go team!”; “C’mon say yes”; “I’m sick of this. Let’s go already.”; “We’re ready to depart, off we go”.
c’est enfantin means “that’s child’s play”, simple, easy.
courir sur le haricot is a slang expression that means to annoy, or aggravate (énerver, ennuyer, agacer, embêter). The key to understanding the origin is that haricot is an antiquated word for the big toe. So this is “stepping [running] on your toe[s]”. The conjugation is tricky: «Tu me cours sur le haricot» – the possessive is done as a direct object of the verb, not a change of the article on le haricot.
que dalle is slang term that means “absolutely nothing at all”.
This is the second (and last) batch of unfamiliar vocabulary words I culled from George Simenon’s 1931 novel La Tête d’un Homme. These words appear in chapters 6- 12. In past vocabulary list posts I included only words and expressions I couldn’t recall even in context. In this list, I’ve included any word I didn’t think I would recognize and know the meaning of if I saw it in complete isolation. So the list is longer than usual.
un machin is a funny, slang word, quite common in modern speech and print. I somehow hadn’t registered encountering it before now. It is a close synonym of the words truc and bidule. The word means a non-specific object, akin to the English “thingy”, “thing-a-ma-bob”, or “what-cha-ma-call-it”. You use it when you don’t know or have forgotten the name for something, or when you refer to a large collection of disparate things. It is also used to refer to a person in a pejorative and dismissive fashion, like “what’s his name” or “somebody or other.” You don’t know the person’s name, but it’s really of no interest or importance. Simenon uses it in a police officer’s description of a run down hotel: «L’auberge est rien de luxueux… un machin pour les rouliers» (“the hotel is nothing fancy… a hole in the wall for truckers.” Note that the word machin should not be confused with une machine, which is more or less exactly the English “machine”: a reputable mechanical object used for sewing, cleaning, manufacture, construction, etc.
taches de son are freckles. They are also called taches de rousseur or simply rousseurs. It took me a good 15 minutes of sleuthing to figure out why this expression aligned with its meaning. It turns out that son has multiple meanings: a third-person singular possessive pronoun; a sound that you hear; and … part of the outer envelope of a wheat kernel, what we call “bran” in english. Turns out this is a readily available product. Moreover, the processes of milling wheat into flour includes an intermediate product before final filtering where you have mostly flour, but with some specks of bran still mixed in. It appears mostly white, with some darker spots of bran. Thus, taches de son.
une rafale is a gust of wind, strong and sudden. Not to be confused with la rafle, which is the stem to which grapes attach. I learned that word during a winery tour in France. Curiously, neither of these seems to be most frequent meaning present in search results for these words. La rafale is also the name of a French fighter jet, while une rafle means a police round-up notably of Jews in World War II (the subject of a 2010 film) and of Algerians during their 1958-62 war for independence.
Une rafle et La Rafle
Une rafale
La Rafale
un haut-le-coeur is a shudder, typically of nausea or disgust. Also what one might experience after gulping strong spirits.
un cabotin is a ham actor, and le cabotinage means “histrionics”. The word comes from M. Cabotin, a charismatic 17th century French actor and charlatan promoter of miracle cures. The word is undoubtedly negative, though was perhaps rehabilitated somewhat by French singer Charles Aznavour in his song Le Cabotin.
Polichinelle marionnette from late 1800s.
Polichinelle is the French name of a character from the Italian commedia dell’arte theater tradition. It is Pulcinella in Italian. The character migrated to the marionnette and puppet theater, and into the English language as Punch (as in a “Punch and Judy show”). In modern French, the word un polichinelle can mean not only the character himself or a marionnette or doll in that form, but also an easily swayed, foolish person. However by far the most frequent use of the word is in the expression un secret de polichinelle, meaning “an open secret”: that which everyone knows but no one is supposed to speak of.
Common words, uncommon meanings
un cachet is a word with multiple meanings. It can be a stamp or a seal placed upon a document. That’s how Simenon uses it here («les pages [de son passeport] étaient couvertes de cachets et de visas»). But it can also mean stylistic originality (which is the meaning of the appropriated word in English). And the first meaning I learned for this word in school was “pill” or “tablet”. All of these derive from the common sense of “to stamp” or “to press”– pills are powder pressed into a form, seals are embossed marks pressed into a document. But there’s one more meaning which I don’t understand. Un cachet can mean a fee for a private lesson, or an appearance fee for a public performer or speaker. Not sure how that ties in with the other meanings.
un timbre has two meanings: the quality of a sound (or the sound itself); or, a stamp applied to a paper to certify a payment (postage stamp, tax receipt, etc.) After using un cachet for a passport stamp, Simenon uses timbre for the sound of a bell.
un pignon is both a pine tree and a small toothed gear in a mechanism (think “rack and pinion steering”). I’m not sure which meaning is more common, but Simenon used it in the tree sense here («un ruban de Seine aperçu entre deux pignons»).
Une bergère (sans Louis)
une bergère is a shepherdess, but was also the name of a popular style of low, spacious arm chair starting in 1725, growing popular under Louis XV. Given he was king for nearly 60 years, it’s quite likely such a chair was literally under Louis XV at some point
Earlier this week I finished reading George Simenon’s 1931 novel La Tête d’un Homme, the fifth adventure of the famous commissaire Maigret. It spans 135 pages in the Tout Maigret edition from Omnibus and took me just 3 days of reading to get through – summer evenings are good for that. I noted 101 unfamiliar words as I read, though I’ve tightened my standards for familiarity. In earlier posts I included only words and expressions I couldn’t recall even in context. In this list, I’ve included any word I didn’t think I would recognize and know the meaning of if I saw it in complete isolation. So the list is longer than usual. In fact it is so long, I’m going to split it into two posts so that I don’t tire of writing and my readers don’t tire of reading. I’ve posted the first batch of fifty below, with links to definitions from Linguee and word frequencies from Google Books NGram Viewer.
The novel is pretty good, though it still has that pre-Agatha-Christie style of setting up some exotic and even grotesque situation in advance, and then only revealing it to the reader bit by bit. There’s no puzzle for the reader to figure out, and the whole thing is so contrived as to be unbelievable. Add to that some melodrama and mustache-twirling level cartoon villain, and you’ll know what to expect. Yet with all that, it was a good book. The plot that unspools – an obviously framed man goes to jail protesting his innocence but going silent in the face of incriminating evidence; Inspector Maigret anonymously orchestrates the man’s escape in order to trail him afterwards; the suspect gives Maigret the slip and then re-emerges in unexpected ways; the true villain finally appears and loses to Maigret in a battle of wits – is entertaining and at times original. There’s even a fair number of action scenes that successfully generate suspense and surprise outcomes. And Maigret seems far from infallible, which is an important ingredient for a detective series. So all in all a good direction for the series to be going.
The unfamiliar words are disproportionately about positions body’s can be found in and verbs that change them: avachi (slumped), s’affaler (slouch, sprawl), jucher (perch), bosselé (dented, deformed), califourchon (stradling), un loque (a wreck), coudoyer (jostle, press up against), chanceler (wobble, falter), frôler (brush, nudge), entre quatre yeux (head-to-head).
Here’s the first part of the list, from chapters 1- 5, sorted by modern word frequency. Recall that the value is estimated by counting all words in all French books Google knows about in the given decade. For comparison, the masculine definite article le occurs with a frequency of 1 in 60, while all the union of all articles (le, la, les, un, une, de, des) taken together account for 1 in 8 words. .
un triporteur is a 3-wheeled cycle, with one wheel in back and two wheels in front on either side of a box or trunk for cargo. These were popular for delivering cargo or for peddlers to go around town selling their wares, though the word was super rare in writings of the time. The item and the word are still in common use in modern France.
[Collection Jules Beau. Photographie sportive] : T. 16. Années 1901 et 1902 / Jules Beau : F. 25v. [Course de Tri-Porteurs, 26 janvier 1902];
glabre means “hairless”, either from shaving or from baldness. It was a fairly common adjective in 1930, but has been falling since 1950 and is now a one-in-a-million rarity.
cahin-caha describes a slow, erratic pace of progress; patchy, staggered, or struggling.
un remorqueur is a tug boat. Tug boats were increasingly big in France for about 70 years, reaching their peak mention just a few years before this book was published. Then there was a sudden crash (the Depression?) and things never recovered.
se morfondre is a great verb, meaning to languish or to mope. Apparently folks do that twice as often now as they did 90 years ago.means “hairless”, either from shaving or from baldness. It was a fairly common adjective in 1930, but has been falling since 1950 and is now a one-in-a-million rarity.
sidi is an honorific title for a man from North Africa, but also is an ethnic label: Commissaire! criait le sidi qu’on poussait vers la porte.
Common words, uncommon meanings
un écho is a sonic reflection, of course, but it can also mean a newspaper column dedicated to gossip and anecdotes about politicians, celebrities, etc. Here is was the vehicle for the paper to print a titillating anonymous letter claiming the prison escape was actually orchestrated by the police.
une rame is an oar or a paddle, but less commonly means a train: Des rames de métro ébranlaient un pont proche.
un cordon is a rope or string, typically for a curtain or bell. But it is also an archaic term for a rope used by a concierge to open the door of a building. In that context, «demander le cordon» means “ask to be let in”.
une bribe is a scrap, a snippet, a shred. This is not to be confused with the english “bribe”, a payment to induce an official to act against their duty. In French, the verb to bribe is soudoyer, while the noun for a bribe is the colorful pot-de-vin – jug of wine. Curious that the French bribe has steadily become more common, tripling in frequency in 80 years.
un pneumatique in modern parlance is a tire, usually shortened to un pneu. But in 1931 it referred to a message delivered by pressurized air tube. Paris had an extensive network of pneumatic tubes that remained in operation for over 100 years, from 1868 all the way through until 1984! I am old enough to have encountered such a system in the 1970s in the New England hospital where my father worked. I find the notion of a city-wide network astonishing.
Pressurized air tubes carried message-filled canisters throughout 1880’s Paris, and for 100 years thereafter!
Yesterday’s mail brought a new issue of L’avant-scène théâtre, dated 1 Décembre 2020. It features the full text of the play Un pas après l’autre by Fabio Marra. I’m not sure why it came just now, six months after the cover date, but at least the website is consistent: it declares that the product is available to purchase only starting 2021-07-02.
Theaters in Paris reopened with limited capacity on May 19, after a six month closure. With nothing new on stage, L’avant-scène théâtre suspended publication of new issues but allowed subscribers to request items from the back catalog. I recently received and read the February 2020 issue containing Marie des poules: Gouvernante chez George Sand, but haven’t had time to write up a post about it. In the meantime, I’ve started another Maigret novel, so the play will have to wait. I’ll get to it though – vacationing for several days over the July 4 holiday should give me plenty of time for reading. As they say, un pas après l’autre…
Update 2021-06-21: I finished this 135-page book in just three days, but collected many unfamiliar vocabulary words. It’s taking me some time to enter and research them. Vocab list coming in a post later this week.
I couldn’t sleep last night (2021-06-18), so I started the next Maigret novel in the series, La tête d’un homme (1931). It’s pretty quick going – in 3 hours or so I read 60 pages, which is a little under a half of the novel. I’m noting unfamiliar words and expressions as I go, but I’ll hold off from posting them until I’ve finished the book.
The story has an entertaining setup. Chapter 1 sees Maigret, a judge, and a prison official lurking in the shadows of a prison courtyard while an inmate effects an escape. We learn that, unbeknownst to the prisoner, the escape was arranged by Maigret himself as a way to test his hypothesis that the man is innocent of the crime for which he’s been condemned to death. Something about the evidence in the case has been nagging at Maigret, and he’s convinced the others to go along with the charade in hopes of tracking down the real culprit. Maigret guarantees that all will be well, and offers to resign should something go awry. Naturally, the escapee slips through the police surveillance and Maigret has only 10 days to save his career and find the convicted man… or perhaps the actual criminal instead.
Like many of the early Maigret books, this one has a lot of scenes in bars and a lot of river activity. So I’m dusting off my remembrances of chopine, juché, and acajou, as well as of péniches, remorqueurs, débardeurs and the like.
No, not that débardeur…
…this débardeur
All that’s left of this noble profession seems to be a T-shirt style.
It turns out that there are many other meanings of dos d’âne: it describes a style of desk, a method of bridge construction, and a topographical feature (rolling hills).
Of course, one cannot look at the sign on the right without thinking of this famous hat … er, I mean snake.
In the course of refining the curriculum for a course of private lessons for me this summer, one of the French teachers I’m working with told me «N’hésitez pas à établir une liste des points de grammaire que vous voulez réviser, des sujets que vous voudriez aborder, etc.» (“Don’t hesitate to make a list of grammar rules that you want to review, subjects you’d like to tackle, etc.”). My grammar is pretty rusty, so I wasn’t sure how to respond to this question. “Who is wise? One who knows that they doe not know what they do not know.”
Fortunately, I am a collector of French books and study materials. On my 2018 trip to Roye, I bought out the bookstore in nearby Compiègne. OK, not literally. But I did pick up a trio of reference books published under the title «Bescherelle Francais Coffret». They cover verb conjugations, spelling rules, and grammar. Bescherelle is a names that’s been a leader in French grammar for over 150 years — Louis-Nicolas Bescherelle is the namesake here. I have no idea whether any part of his original work or organization remains in the modern editions, but his name sells, and tradition is tradition.
So, if I’m asked to make a list of the points I want to review, I figure I might as well see what points there are, and then put them into various buckets (“know cold”, “rusty”, “could use review”, “new to me”, etc.). Of course, the book is 320 pages long, and is meant as a reference work. After all, who sits down and reads a grammar book from the beginning?! Well, anyone who knows me will not be at all surprised to learn that the answer is “David”! To offer an example of this, part of my job at work is to be intimately familiar with the standards of good style for writing computer code in the Python language, and to confer onto other Google engineers certification that they have sufficient command of these style rules to write Python code without additional supervision.
I started a few days ago on page one, and it’s wonderful. When I say my French grammar is terrible, what I really mean is that I once knew all these rules cold and have either forgotten them or lost the ability to apply them automatically. But reading the first 30 pages of the book is a pleasant exercise in systematic linguistics. The book starts with basic notions: word (lexical and grammatical), part of speech, word group, locution, sentence, text, discourse. It pauses to articulate the distinction between a sentence and an utterance (or more generally an enunciation), as well as the difference between significance and sense. Then it moves on to functions of word groups (subject, object, exposition, etc.), and the relationships between clauses, sentences, and paragraphs within a text.
I don’t know that it was at all helpful in responding to the teacher’s request for a list of grammatical points to be covered in this summer’s course. But it was entertaining. I think I’ll keep reading and see what I think of the next 30 pages.
I would love to go to France this year, but making plans in 2020 or early 2021 to travel in later 2021 was a risky business. Both the US and France seem to be doing pretty well with Covid at this point, but that was far from predictable 6 months ago. All things considered, I decided to stay put this summer and travel only late in 2021, or more likely not until 2022.
So I’ve been looking into constructing a French-themed “staycation” this summer. The plan is to set aside a few weeks for intensive study, reading, writing and listening. I’ll take the time off from work, minimize domestic chores, and enjoy myself. Of course, not buying airplane tickets or paying extra for lodgings gives me a lot of leftover vacation budget, which I’m hoping to redirect towards getting professional instruction into the mix. And since my motto is “why do it when you can overdo it?”, I’m aiming for something like 20 hours per week (!).
I did some new research and dug up some of my past research on this, and have made successful contact with two vendors. The first is creatively named “A Breath of French Air“, and looks to be a sole proprietorship run by Virginie Bordier, who recently moved from France (Annecy?) to the US (Arizona). I swapped a couple of emails with her and am scheduled for a meet-and-greet tonight. If that goes well, I’ll likely do a week of intense study with her in late July. The second is Institut Linguistique Adenet in Montpellier, France. They primarily offer on-site immersion experiences for teens and adults, but also run online group classes through level C1 and private lessons. I sent them an inquiry this week and learned that the 6 hour France / Boston timezone offset rules out any of their group classes for me, but they did offer to arrange private lessons at a discounted bulk rate. I’m pursuing this further.
I spend a lot more time on my French hobby than I do writing this blog. My posts until now have been multi-paragraph affairs, along the lines of the 800-word newspaper column. As a result, it takes me a fair amount of “activation energy” to sit down and write an article, and somewhat more to finish an article. I have half a dozen abandoned posts lying around, and a dozen more sketched out in my head whose first words I never even put to paper (pixel). But I like the actual doing of the French hobby too much to do less of it in order to do more blog writing.
So I’m going to try an experiment with microblogging. Rather than (or, ideally, in addition to) writing medium- and long-form articles, I’m also going to make very short posts on my French hobby. I’ll try to avoid the “just ate a Hot Pocket” level of trivial detail, but the goal is to form a kind of diary of my daily French activities. These posts will more focus on the raw substance of what I do rather than on context, analysis, judgement, connection, or completeness.
It will no doubt take me some iteration and tinkering to get the technique right. A long stream of irregular, undifferentiated posts? A post per day with multiple updates? A post per week with updates? A post per undertaking (grammar exercises, TV series, books)? Who knows. I’ll start somewhere and see what happens.
