Vocabulary

2021-08-052021-08-05

Summer Lessons, Day 5: La Disparition de Stephanie Mailer

On my last day of lessons with Virignie we focused on connecting words, les mots de liaison. We studied two texts: an excerpt from the book «Sauvons les garcons» by Jean-Louis Auduc, and an imagined product launch presentation for a fictional sports car. These gave us a chance to see in action expressions that sequence an argument (like d’abord, ensuite, enfin); that juxtapose ideas while asserting a particular relationship between them (d’une part/d’autre part, tant … que); or that qualify or amplify a statement (hormis, mis à part, notamment, à savoir). Finally, we identified some expressions that are rampant in oral argument but sound too familiar when written down (de coup, bref). Good stuff all, well worth my future study.

Separate from this grammar session, we did the usual editing of my latest written output (the promised book review of La Disparition de Stephanie Mailer by Joël Dicker). I wrote the original version in an hour and a half or so, though I had little more than two paragraphs to show for it. Still, this was plenty to drive a good editing / re-writing session. My favorite bit from this was Virginie’s observation that «… des portraits à peine esquissés, vite oubliés.» felt too sudden, too brusque. The simple insertion of a single word suffices to repair this: «… des portraits à peine esquissés et vite oubliés.». “That way the two phrases each have five syllables,” she says (in French). “It swings better: «à peine esquissés (gestures left) et vite oubliés (gestures right)»”. Good writer, that Virginie.

Here’s the full text, before and after.

Version originale

Le quatrième roman de Joël Dicker, lauréat du Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française, a paru en 2018, six ans après son chef d’oeuvre La Verité sur l’Affair Harry Quebert. Comme celui-ci, La Disparition de Stephanie Mailer (Éditions de Fallois) est un roman policier situé aux États-Unis. Comme en Harry Quebert, l’intrigue est compliqué, voire rococo. Encore une fois une femme qui a disparu et le meurtre multiple commis il y a longtemps. Et comme d’habitude, Dicker nous raconte son histoire dans une manière hachée, sautant parmis les années 1990s, 2000s, et 2010s presque aléatoire. Mes ces ingrédients familiers, qu’il a mélangés avec légèrté dans Harry Quebert, sont badigeonnés en couches épaises avec une main lourde et étourdie. Le resultat est un échec littéraire même s’il était une réussite commerciale.

Le roman n’a pas un personnage principal mais plutôt une distribution d’ensemble. Mais c’est un véritable ménagerié (défilé? tribu?) avec plus de trente personnages récurrents, dont une liste apparait à la fin de l’ouvrage. (Peut-être si j’avais su dès que j’ai entamé ce pavé de 800 pages que ce recensement éxistait, je aurais mieux suivi tous les virages en épingle.) Au-delà de la quantité de personnages, leurs caractérisations sont fade. Il nous donne des gens à peine esquisés, dont mes souvenirs flanchent déja.

Pire que son aménagement des personnage c’est rhytme avec lequel il raconte les évenements. …

Version corrigée

Le quatrième roman de Joël Dicker, lauréat du Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française, a été publié en 2018, six ans après la parution de son chef-d’œuvre La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert. Comme celui-ci, La Disparition de Stephanie Mailer (Éditions de Fallois) est un roman policier situé aux États-Unis. Comme pour Harry Quebert, l’intrigue est compliquée, voire baroque. Encore une fois une femme disparue et un multiple meurtre commis il y a longtemps. Et comme d’habitude, Dicker nous raconte son histoire d’une manière hachée, en sautant des années 1990, aux années 2000 et 2010 presque aléatoirement. Mais ces ingrédients familiers, qu’il a mélangés avec légèreté dans Harry Quebert, sont badigeonnés en couches épaisses d’une main lourde et étourdie. Le résultat est un échec littéraire même s’il a été une réussite commerciale.

Le roman n’a pas un seul personnage principal mais plutôt une distribution d’ensemble. Mais c’est un véritable défilé avec plus de trente personnages récurrents, dont une liste apparaît à la fin de l’ouvrage. (Peut-être si je n’avais pas appris l’existence de ce recensement qu’après avoir terminé ce pavé de 800 pages, j’aurais mieux suivi tous les virages en épingle.) Au-delà de la quantité de personnages, leur caractérisation est fade. L’auteur nous présente des portraits à peine esquissés et vite oubliés.

Pire que la construction de ses personnages, c’est le rythme avec lequel il raconte les événements qui/que …

As I mentioned, I didn’t get around to writing about the themes or the plot. But I did get the opportunity to learn from Virginie a very important word in the world of reviewing: «divulgâcher». The word means “to spoil”, as in “to reveal spoilers”. It comes from combining divulguer (to reveal) with gâcher (to ruin). «Divulgâcher» officially entered the language (with the caveat “Québecois”) in 2020, when it was one of 150 words newly added to the prestigious dictionnaire LaRousse. I haven’t been able to verify if it has a noun form, though, so I guess “No spoilers!” must be «Ne divulgâche pas!»

2021-08-032021-08-03

La Maison du loup: Jack London et Benoit Solès

This being on vacation thing is pretty sweet. After four-plus hours of French lessons this morning and a leisurely lunch of bread, cheese, basil, peppers, cucumbers, and cherries, I decided to put off doing my assigned homework (watching a French film) and instead curled up on my living-room couch with La Maison du loup, the latest play by Benoit Solès. I had started it some time last week, but never got past the first scene despite carrying it around with me for days. Somehow, today I was in the right frame of mind to continue, and practically inhaled the rest of it in one go. A very pleasant literary digestif.

I first encountered Benoit Solès – quite literally – on December 27, 2019, when I saw him perform his multi-Molière-winning play La Machine de Turing at théâtre Michel in Paris. He both authored the play and originated the title role, first at the festival Off d’Avignon in 2018 and then again later that year in Paris. The show was outstanding and, afterwards, he came out and chatted with the audience, signed posters, etc. I purchased both the script of the play and a poster, which he signed after graciously talking with me for several minutes.

I took great care with the poster during the rest of the trip and had it framed when I got home. It hangs prominently on my living room wall. As for the script, I re-read it a few months later and felt that it lost something in moving from stage to page. Even with Solès’s performance freshly in my mind, the lines were uninspiring and the characterization of Alan Turing seemed forced. I found this quite surprising, as I had enjoyed the play enormously when I say him act it in person, and had found that presentation of Turing thoroughly convincing. Funny (and yet of course blindingly self-evident) how much a professional actor brings to the experience of a piece of theater.

So it was with mixed preconceptions that I received the script of La Maison du loup in a recent issue of L’avant-scène théâtre. Would I find reading it weak tea, and regret once more having scrubbed my plans to attend the 2021 Avignon festival, where this latest Solès creation debuted? Or would I be better able to elicit from the text the magic I had experienced in Solès’s presence in 2019?. Happily, it was more the latter than the former. While I wouldn’t go so far as to label this a “consummation devoutly to be wished”, I did find it quite easy to overlay my extrapolation of a Solès performance on the words before my eyes. The overall result was very satisfying.

The theme of La machine de Turing is the tragedy of a great man who accomplished great things, but whom society could not accept because of his other behaviors, both genuinely odd and harmlessly homosexual. The theme of La Maison du loup is certainly not identical, but in many ways it rhymes. Reformed prisoner Ed Morrell (played by Solès) arrives one summer evening in 1913 at the woodlands house of the celebrated author Jack London. London’s wife Charmian has invited Ed for a visit after reading his magazine article about the plight of a fellow prisoner, Jacob, condemned to death. While Ed thinks he is there to enlist the aid of the famous man in pleading with the California governor for clemency for Jacob, Charmian reveals that she brought him there in order to purchase the story of the condemned prisoner as the basis of Jack’s next novel (Jack, drunk, dissipated, and focused on paying for his lavish forest retreat, initially thinks Ed is an accountant come to collect debts owed to the architect).

As this first round of complications gets untangled, we learn that London’s last several novels have in fact been based on other people’s ideas, rewarmed, partially written by Charmian, and sold under Jack London’s marketable name. But hiding behind Charmian’s tawdry ploy to line up her husband’s next pot-boiler is a more noble motive, to which she eventually confesses: she wants her husband back. Not the bombastic, money hungry, whiskey drinking, morphine popping, image conscious sell-out that he is now, but the gutter-born, idealistic, fiercely righteous, hard-scrabble, auto-bootstrap-pulled socialist that she fell in love with. Charmian’s mid-play declaration of this desire drives both men from her and also apart from each other.

The remainder of the play is a sufficient resolution of this dilemma and as happy an ending as one could expect. London agrees to plead for Jacob, but his attempted intercession comes hours after Jacob’s death. Ed is convinced to divulge the story of his own fifteen-year stay in prison, his discovery of London’s works in the prison library, and the source of his compulsion to rescue Jacob. And London completes his own personal redemption, first refusing to be spoon-fed either a narrative for his next novel or a tonic for his bourgeois betrayal, and then alchemizing the joint story of Ed and Jacob into a powerful polemic against the California penal system.

A somewhat clumsy epilogue to the play, delivered by Ed in a closing monologue, informs the audience that Charmian and Jack’s love is rekindled, their mansion in the woods burns down, and the publication of his last great novel (The Star Rover, 1915) leads to substantial reforms of California prisons, ending various inhumane practices. It goes on to relate that Jack London died soon after from a morphine overdose, while Charmian went on to publish several works on prisoner rights.

How much of this is true, I don’t know. A cursory skimming of the web seems to corroborate that Ed Morrell was a real person, that he was tortured at the hands of the San Quentin prison staff, and that his story was the basis of The Star Rover. But I couldn’t immediately find confirmation of reforms enacted pursuant to the appearance of the novel. Perhaps this indicates Solès has injected his own romance into the story of Ed Morrell and Jack London, or perhaps the fact that this history is all but forgotten is exactly what motivated him to rediscover it and re-educate the theatrical public. Though I must say I’m a bit hazy on exactly what segment of the French theater-going public is in great need of a reminder of the battle for human rights in the American prison system.

Ah, well. Not all art needs to stand up to such demanding scrutiny. The play is, in any case, definitely worth a read. And if you happen to be in France when Solès next performs it (tickets available for January 2022 and May 2022, but with Covid who knows), definitely worth the effort to go see it.

I made a note of several of the words that I looked up while reading the play. Click through on the links to learn the definitions.

2021-07-26

Like, seriously, you know?

The French newspaper Le Figaro has a pedantic article this morning on linguistic tics that infest the French language and that you are well advised to avoid. Similar locutions exist in English, and some in Le Figaro’s list have direct counterparts in English.

«Du coup»: This is properly used to mean “instantly” or “as an immediate consequence”. «Son moteur a explosé et du coup sa voiture a pris feu.» But in familiar French it is being used to mean many things including “hey” («Du coup, tu fais quoi ce soir?», «Mais du coup, tu as réagi comment?»); “instead”: («On ne sort pas ce soir. On fait quoi du coup?»); and “so” («il ne veut pas manger de salade, du coup je fais des haricots»).
«Grave»: The literal translation is “serious”, meaning reserved or dignified. But in current slang it corresponds exactly to the English slang “seriously”: «C’est beau non?» – «Grave!». = “It’s nice, right?” – “Seriously!”. You can almost hear the unspoken “… dude!” as a second word in the response.
«Trop»: This simple “too much” can relieve the lazy speaker of specifying of what, exactly, there is too much. «Que pense-tu de cette robe» «Oh, elle est trop». Le Figaro recommends richer words like «d’époustouflant» or «étonnant», or at least more varied qualifiers like «beaucoup» or «très».
«Genre»: Literally this is “type” or “variety”, as in a literary genre: mystery, romance, horror, adventure. But it is used today in many places where the English slang “like” would fit: «Tu vois ce que je veux dire? Genre c’est dingue non?» = “You see what I mean? Like, it’s crazy, right?” The French Academy weighs in to declare that when starting a sentence, this slang means «pas possible!» or «sans blague!» . I heard this once or twice just yesterday in an episode of Dix Pour Cent.
«Donc»: So you know how it’s awkward to start a sentence all of a sudden? So you sort of take a running start? So that’s what «donc» has become in popular French. I’m afraid I do this all the time in my casual email writing in English. I pepper my sentences with leading “so”. The formal accepted usage of «donc» in French is either as “therefore”, to indicate a conclusion drawn from previous propositions; or, as a return from a digression (“I was in a bar. It was smoky. The piano was playing. The bartender looked mean. Two clients were having a fight. So there I was, trying to find information”). But in popular spoken French, it now plays the part of a gentle attention getting “hear ye! hear ye!” at the start of a conversation turn. As Figaro puts it: À peine ouvrons-nous la bouche que le voilà dégainé: «Donc je voulais te dire», «donc à propos de ce projet», «donc tu en es où en ce moment?»

So there you have it. Seriously, these French are too much. We could, like, totally learn to talk like that in a second. Hey, d’you think? I swear.

2021-07-07

Diary 2021-07-07

I went on vacation last week, so this is an update on various French activities here and there.

This morning I listened to a couple of episodes of the Français Authentique podcast: Faire chou blanc and Je ne progresse plus en français. Que faire? (can’t find a link). They are slow and simple, but not too simple. Decent mindless content while walking, good for reinforcement.

Yesterday I took the placement exam for my 2-week course in August with ILA (Institut Linguistique Adenet) in Montpellier. The school is in Montpellier, but I will be in my living room doing the course by video conference. Traveling to France in summer 2021 was too daunting for post-pandemic me. The test had 100 questions, multiple choice, with an “I don’t know” option for each one. The instructions exhorted me not to guess, for my own benefit, as it’s a diagnostic instrument. Most of the questions were about grammar, 10 or 15 were about oral comprehension, and a handful were about vocabulary. I’d say 60 or 70 felt automatic, another 10-20 required deliberate application of a rule I knew, and the rest were either unknown to me or involved a forgotten entry in a rarely used part of the conjugation table of an irregular verb.

Speaking of Montpellier, one of the other guests at the inn where we was staying was a French woman who had lived all her life in Montpellier before coming to the US some 10 years ago. Had a nice conversation with her. She runs a library-based French conversation group in Pittsburgh.

On vacation I finished the next 1931 Maigret novel, Le chien jaune. It started fairly vaguely, with scattered episodes only loosely connected, and making barely an impression on Maigret. Eventually it all came together to a satisfactory, if not gripping, resolution.

I read a short play, Un pas après l’autre, which appeared in L’avant scène théâtre , numéro 1493, December 2020. Somehow it was only published in July, though it reached me in June? Whatever. Two middle aged sisters with funny rapport, a failing haute-couture shop, a son recovering from PTSD after time in prison for a homicide he was convicted of while a juvenile, which he insists he didn’t commit, a fashion designer intern, a contest for newcomers to the field. Good dialogue, nice character development, then the play ends suddenly with not much story or dénouement. Pity, I liked the set up.

Finally, I had my regular weekly French lesson yesterday with Nora. A lot of it was my relating the story of witnessing a car accident during our vacation, and of various parties’ assisting the driver. Vocabulary words or expressions that came up:

pluvieuse, pluvieux, le brouillard, s’allonger, un ruisseau, renverser, un fuyard, le dénivelé, accroché, fixé, un virage, faire un tonneau, ça nous a pris, elle s’est précipitée, elle s’est ruée, elle s’est hâtée, à portée de voix, à portée de vue, je suis retourné à ma voiture, j’ai repris ma voiture, le caissier/la caissière, les secours, il a eu l’air de, une trousse de premiers secours, il enchaînait, il tremblait, saigner, une hémorragie, un rapport, informer, civière, civet, il réussissait à marcher, un coussin gonflable, bousillé, nous n’étions pas pressés, nous n’avions pas de presse, on s’est mis d’accord, du travail dans le vide, découler.

I think that’s it. All done with vacation, back to ordinary life. Probably less French activity.

2021-06-29

Franchir, Affranchir

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.

Confusing, right?

2021-06-282021-07-07

Français Authentique (Chaine YouTube)

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”.
je suis vert means …
être mal barré means …
avoir les yeux plus grand que … is
ça calle means …
c’est tiré par les cheveux means ….

And from the 5 minutes series:

en effet is ….
il s’agit de … means
ça me gave is
au cas ou is
cependant, toutefois, néanmoins, pourtant, …

2021-06-272021-06-27

Vocab list: La Tête d’un Homme, Part 2

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.

See Vocab list: La Tête d’un Homme, Part 1 for the words from chapters 1-5, as well as my musings on the novel itself.

Here’s the list of all 50 unfamiliar words, sorted by modern word frequency.

expression (root)	Frequency in 2010	Frequency in 1970	Frequency in 1930
machin	1 in 19,000	1 in 12,500	1 in 16,100
bergère	1 in 85,000	1 in 88,300	1 in 82,400
timbre	1 in 116,000	1 in 67,400	1 in 29,900
ronger	1 in 142,000	1 in 171,000	1 in 148,000
caserne	1 in 177,000	1 in 181,000	1 in 171,000
infime	1 in 183,000	1 in 203,000	1 in 188,000
cachet	1 in 198,000	1 in 140,000	1 in 113,000
velléité	1 in 275,000	1 in 446,000	1 in 335,000
sursis	1 in 279,000	1 in 218,000	1 in 271,000
apparat	1 in 308,000	1 in 316,000	1 in 333,000
fichu	1 in 325,000	1 in 617,000	1 in 560,000
tare	1 in 327,000	1 in 253,000	1 in 149,000
rafale	1 in 332,000	1 in 388,000	1 in 554,000
épave	1 in 346,000	1 in 371,000	1 in 345,000
piètre	1 in 357,000	1 in 678,000	1 in 691,000
râle	1 in 358,000	1 in 450,000	1 in 339,000
pignon	1 in 398,000	1 in 386,000	1 in 233,000
décousu	1 in 427,000	1 in 686,000	1 in 707,000
délabré	1 in 516,000	1 in 683,000	1 in 650,000
flairer	1 in 544,000	1 in 450,000	1 in 386,000
ployer	1 in 634,000	1 in 470,000	1 in 342,000
tamiser	1 in 640,000	1 in 1,120,000	1 in 896,000
fourvoyer	1 in 732,000	1 in 1,090,000	1 in 1,190,000
boutade	1 in 745,000	1 in 523,000	1 in 442,000
bigarré	1 in 773,000	1 in 860,000	1 in 493,000
démiurge	1 in 805,000	1 in 1,110,000	1 in 2,180,000
à son gré	1 in 844,000	1 in 391,000	1 in 259,000
hécatombe	1 in 993,000	1 in 1,120,000	1 in 1,070,000
tripoter	1 in 954,000	1 in 1,880,000	1 in 2,990,000
bousculade	1 in 1,020,000	1 in 1,280,000	1 in 1,240,000
persienne	1 in 1,180,000	1 in 1,170,000	1 in 987,000
fêlure	1 in 1,220,000	1 in 2,170,000	1 in 2,610,000
penderie	1 in 1,430,000	1 in 3,580,000	1 in 9,600,000
rabrouer	1 in 1,460,000	1 in 2,740,000	1 in 2,540,000
tintamarre	1 in 1,750,000	1 in 2,110,000	1 in 2,340,000
venelle	1 in 1,990,000	1 in 3,630,000	1 in 3,790,000
jambages	1 in 2,350,000	1 in 1,710,000	1 in 1,370,000
bourrade	1 in 2,500,000	1 in 2,950,000	1 in 2,820,000
dégringolade	1 in 2,500,000	1 in 4,910,000	1 in 4,060,000
mercerie	1 in 2,510,000	1 in 949,000	1 in 1,750,000
griserie	1 in 2,590,000	1 in 1,850,000	1 in 1,380,000
polichinelle	1 in 2,960,000	1 in 4,040,000	1 in 2,880,000
à brûle-pourpoint	1 in 3,090,000	1 in 4,740,000	1 in 3,980,000
roulier	1 in 3,930,000	1 in 3,120,000	1 in 2,390,000
veinard	1 in 4,010,000	1 in 8,270,000	1 in 8,520,000
cabotin	1 in 4,030,000	1 in 2,900,000	1 in 2,320,000
brouiller les cartes	1 in 6,120,000	1 in 7,690,000	1 in 13,100,000
bitte	1 in 6,460,000	1 in 8,610,000	1 in 13,300,000
se griser	1 in 15,900,000	1 in 11,000,000	1 in 5,880,000
haut-le-coeur	1 in 74,800,000	1 in 132,000,000	1 in 193,000,000
tache de son	1 in 94,500,000	1 in 111,000,000	1 in 89,600,000

Word notes

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.

I found multiple interesting treatments of the word un machin while researching, including this French Word of the Day post and this Français Authentique video:

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.

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 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

2021-06-262021-06-26

Vocab list: La Tête d’un Homme, Part 1

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. .

expression (root)	Frequency in 2010	Frequency in 1970	Frequency in 1930
écho	1 in 29,100	1 in 46,500	1 in 57,900
rame	1 in 144,000	1 in 139,000	1 in 125,000
cordon	1 in 159,000	1 in 122,000	1 in 74,000
frôler	1 in 183,000	1 in 351,000	1 in 391,000
greffier	1 in 237,000	1 in 125,000	1 in 82,300
soulier	1 in 243,000	1 in 162,000	1 in 143,000
broyer	1 in 250,000	1 in 210,000	1 in 172,000
bribe	1 in 266,000	1 in 641,000	1 in 845,000
broncher	1 in 329,000	1 in 365,000	1 in 235,000
terne	1 in 383,000	1 in 304,000	1 in 252,000
renifler	1 in 403,000	1 in 977,000	1 in 1,500,000
grignoter	1 in 437,000	1 in 985,000	1 in 1,590,000
chanceler	1 in 497,000	1 in 471,000	1 in 392,000
pneumatique	1 in 545,000	1 in 207,000	1 in 307,000
jucher	1 in 570,000	1 in 833,000	1 in 839,000
pétiller	1 in 602,000	1 in 1,060,000	1 in 884,000
éperdument	1 in 699,000	1 in 988,000	1 in 731,000
ornière	1 in 730,000	1 in 746,000	1 in 735,000
blafarde	1 in 777,000	1 in 967,000	1 in 856,000
écroulement	1 in 796,000	1 in 568,000	1 in 507,000
rixe	1 in 857,000	1 in 875,000	1 in 793,000
carrosserie	1 in 930,000	1 in 757,000	1 in 451,000
glabre	1 in 1,020,000	1 in 432,000	1 in 224,000
affaler	1 in 1,030,000	1 in 2,230,000	1 in 3,300,000
loque	1 in 1,060,000	1 in 769,000	1 in 497,000
cuir chevelu	1 in 1,330,000	1 in 2,410,000	1 in 1,100,000
froissement	1 in 1,340,000	1 in 1,260,000	1 in 725,000
douille	1 in 1,390,000	1 in 995,000	1 in 648,000
califourchon	1 in 1,580,000	1 in 2,480,000	1 in 2,400,000
remorqueur	1 in 1,660,000	1 in 841,000	1 in 317,000
débardeur	1 in 1,690,000	1 in 2,810,000	1 in 2,820,000
avachi	1 in 1,790,000	1 in 4,440,000	1 in 7,990,000
potelé	1 in 1,830,000	1 in 2,580,000	1 in 2,220,000
planton	1 in 1,920,000	1 in 2,170,000	1 in 2,010,000
crépu	1 in 1,980,000	1 in 2,190,000	1 in 1,730,000
falot	1 in 2,160,000	1 in 1,370,000	1 in 1,020,000
bosselée	1 in 2,610,000	1 in 1,830,000	1 in 915,000
bock	1 in 3,380,000	1 in 3,380,000	1 in 1,910,000
lorgnon	1 in 3,560,000	1 in 2,130,000	1 in 1,150,000
sidi	1 in 4,100,000	1 in 8,580,000	1 in 10,500,000
coudoyer	1 in 4,760,000	1 in 1,600,000	1 in 779,000
cahin-caha	1 in 4,830,000	1 in 7,480,000	1 in 8,690,000
se morfondre	1 in 4,980,000	1 in 10,600,000	1 in 11,500,000
à portée de voix	1 in 6,280,000	1 in 13,900,000	1 in 28,300,000
rapin	1 in 7,260,000	1 in 4,310,000	1 in 2,510,000
sauterie	1 in 9,020,000	1 in 13,000,000	1 in 8,490,000
triporteur	1 in 10,100,000	1 in 9,220,000	1 in 61,700,000
entre quatre yeux	1 in 25,700,000	1 in 48,800,000	1 in 71,900,000
pot de grès	1 in 38,100,000	1 in 32,800,000	1 in 24,400,000

Word notes

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!

2021-06-182021-06-18

Piggy Banks and Donkey Backs

I learned two fun expressions this week. From my weekly teacher Nora I learned the word une tirelire – a piggy bank.

And from Virginie of A Breath of French Air I learned the expression un dos d’âne – a speed bump.

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.

2021-05-302021-06-01

Le Sang des Sirènes

Last week I finished Le Sang des Sirènes, a crime / thriller novel by French author Thierry Serfaty. At 250 pages and fairly large typeface, it was a quick read. I completed it over the course of 10 days in my usual evenings and weekends pattern. The book was published in 2000 and the plot is centered around industrial espionage and immunology research (intrigue around the hunt to find and profit from a cure for AIDS). Some combination of the modern publication date, my history working at a pharmaceutical company, and my having read a lot of French crime literature likely explain the fact that nearly all the vocabulary was familiar to me. I noted 24 novel words in the first 100 pages or so and then decided just to finish the book without pencil in hand.

This is Serfarty’s first novel. Although it won that year’s Prix Polar for best crime novel from the Festival Polar de Cognac and launched Serfarty’s successful literary second career as an novelist and television screenwriter (he originally trained as a doctor), I didn’t think much of the book.

Le Sang des Sirènes starts with an innovative framing. The prologue is a first person narrative where we meet Jan Hellberg, a recently murdered Danish immunologist. He tells us that, as a scientist, he doesn’t believe in reincarnation. Still, the fact remains that he died in a car crash, and then a spirit – named “Life” – came to him and showed him a mysterious hand sabotaging the brakes hours before. So he’s forced to reconsider his views on the hereafter.

Life offers him the chance to relive the last 6 months of his life in order to discover who had arranged his murder. However, he won’t have any power to change the course of events, and he won’t be able to remember the future details of his life as he retraverses those 6 months. He’ll only be able to remember this bargain he’s made with Life, and to pay closer attention to who might have wanted him dead and acted on that motive. Then he can at least die with the solace of knowing who killed him and why.

I really liked the prologue. Witty, introspective, fresh. Unfortunately, everything goes downhill from there. The main character never really gets developed, and the other characters are cardboard at best. There’s an awful lot of telling and not showing. The pacing is erratic, with long science explanations interspersed with breakneck reversals: “person X is good – no wait, they’re evil – just kidding, good after all.” Many of the Dan Brown novels and their emulators (e.g. The Da Vinci Code) suffer from these same flaws, and feel like they are conceived as movies that happen to have been packaged as novels. It doesn’t surprise me that Serfaty went on to write television screenplays. Also, the cellular biochemistry explanations fall wide of the mark. They add nothing for the reader who knows the material, and I can’t imagine they are satisfying or interesting to the reader who hasn’t seen this since high school.

Le Sang de Sirènes had been sitting on my shelf unread for several years. The price printed on the back is «98,00 F TTC» : 98 pre-euro French francs, all taxes included (recall that the Euro was launched in 1999, but existed only as an invisible currency until coins and banknotes appeared in 2002). I purchased it for $1 from the French Cultural Center of Boston at one of their semi-annual book sales. There are no library markings on it, so I conclude that it was a member donation rather than a library de-acquisition. I’m glad to know that the FCC librarians didn’t think this was worth purchasing in the first place. It’s the sort of book one might imagine picking up in an airport before a long flight and being glad of the in-air diversion. Amusingly, I found nestled in the back a boarding pass stub for an Air France flight 062 from Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris, to LAX, Los Angeles. It includes the name of the passenger, but «la pudeur» restrains me from outing them here.

I’m actually being too hard on the book. It was good for reinforcing vocabulary and for practicing automaticity generally. I noticed several words from my previous post on Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien show up in this novel. So I don’t regret starting or finishing the volume. But I won’t be seeking out other works by Serfaty.

One detail remains: how could a book with these flaws win a literary honor like Prix Polar for best crime novel from the Festival Polar de Cognac? For that, I think one needs to understand the French cultural phenomenon of «La rentrée littéraire». Several years ago a teacher shared with me this video from ARTE. It’s worth a watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ4J1oPLkMg

In short, the French seem to love contests and competitions, and there is a tradition of literary prizes that dates back to the start of the 20th century. The earliest and most prestigious of these is the Prix Goncourt, but many others soon followed. Every fall there are a couple of months of closely watched announcements of various books and authors progressing to the next stage for candidate novels for this or that award. The final winners are announced in time to take full advantage of Christmas sales. The winning books are all displayed with red paper bands wrapping them and shouting the name of the award.

Perhaps more so than in the US (or perhaps not), there’s more than a whiff of theater and self-dealing involved with these awards. The judges are typically authors, and frequently select winners that work with the same publishing houses as themselves. But moreover, the whole thing is as much about marketing as it is about merit. As a result, there is a proliferation of awards and everyone is a winner. In the specific field of crime novels, there are some two dozen annual contests, and many give multiple awards.

In the future, I may trust the recommendations emanating from Cognac more for choosing my brandy than for choosing my reading material.

Here’s the list of unfamiliar vocabulary words I noted:

expression (root)	Frequency in 2010
emprunter	1 in 23,500
jurer	1 in 41,100
chaussé	1 in 58,000
arborer	1 in 135,000
ronger	1 in 142,000
frange	1 in 180,000
fléau	1 in 199,000
brider	1 in 208,000
jalonner	1 in 242,000
toiser	1 in 279,000
cribler	1 in 328,000
rançon	1 in 339,000
retrousser	1 in 508,000
compatir	1 in 517,000
languir	1 in 528,000
gabarit	1 in 631,000
tonitruant	1 in 672,000
hâle	1 in 727,000
déboule	1 in 767,000
ogive	1 in 771,000
carnassier	1 in 1,090,000
bâillonner	1 in 1,140,000
lésiner	1 in 1,340,000
guimbarde	1 in 4,460,000
se morfondre	1 in 4,980,000

Word Notes

une guimbarde is a rare word with multiple meanings. It can denote a musical instrument (a “Jew’s harp”), an old junky car, a 17th-century two-step dance, or a small plane used by a carpenter (a rabot !). In this book, it meant a car. The word frequency was fairly stable in the Google Books corpus at 1 in 20 million from 1800-2000. Then it experienced a sudden jump in between 2003 and 2012, rising to about 1 in 4.5 million, where it has stayed since. Alas, I don’t know which of the meanings has reemerged.
lésiner means to skimp or cut corners. It’s been getting steadily more frequent for 200 years. I looked into the possibility that it was connected to the English “lazy”, but the etymologies are completely different.
tonitruer is “to thunder”, both in the meteorological sense and in the metaphorical sense of speaking loudly and with anger. Curious that the language has both «tonner» and «tonitruer» with apparently the same meaning. I’m not sure if they carry different connotations.

Common words, uncommon meanings

emprunter means “to borrow”, of course, and is routinely a beginner word for the classroom. But it can also mean to take a route or a path to get around: «J’emprunte les escaliers qui mènent à mon bureau.»
jurer commonly means to swear, either in the sense of “avow” or in the sense of “curse”. But it can also mean “to clash” or “to conflict”: «l’élément qui jure dans un ensemble harmonieux».
la chaussée derives from the word «chaussure», “shoe”. The verb «chausser» means to put shoes on someone or something, like a horse. It can also mean to put tires on a vehicle, which I find a pleasant and consistent evolution of the word. But as a noun, «la chaussée» is a roadway, carriageway, highway, or more generally the pavement. This of course is related to the expression for the ground floor of a building, the «rez-de-chaussée».