Les Français pendant qu'elle est parlent vraiment (French as it is really spoken)
Written: Mar 25 '09 (Updated Mar 26 '09)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: A fun read of useful words and phrases for every concept and occasion
Cons: None
The Bottom Line: You'd have to be REALLY fluent to use the language here - and probably be able to run fast
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| Penguinlady's Full Review: Genevieve - Merde Encore! More of the Real French... |
In honor of our long-term Epinions friend ifif1938, who loves France and its people, Stephen Murray has organized a write-off related to all things French. Please visit his profile page to sign up to participate.
*****
I was born into a multi-lingual family. My parents spoke German as their first language, French as their second, and English as their third. They considered linguistic flexibility to be one of the marks of an educated, cultured person, so shortly after we moved to a United Nations community in New York when I was six, they found a French teacher, Mlle. R., and I began private lessons. A year later, I started attending the United Nations International School where everyone took French, so my private lessons were discontinued.
Altogether, I studied French for about 12 years, from grades 2 through 12, and two years in college. By the time I’d finished college, I was sorta fluent, with a decent vocabulary, an equal grasp of the grammar, and a really good accent. (Point of pride: on my only, and very brief, visit to Paris, in 1973, a couple I was chatting with asked me how many years I’d lived there. Parisians aren’t known for tolerating the mangling of their beloved language, so I took that as a compliment.)
One of the things I noticed, though, was that my French was (I use the past tense on purpose, parce que j'ai oublié la majeure partie du vocabulaire) of the stiff, stilted, I’ve only studied it in school but have never really had a chance to speak it to regular people variety. I knew about the passé simple tense, used only in literature, and the subjunctive imperfect; I could make my way through Sartre’s Huis Clos ("L’enfer est d’autres personnes!"); could gargle my r’s with the best of them; and could chat easily about la plume de ma tante, but was at a loss for fluency with the more common conversation, like Merde - je ne peux pas trouver mon passeport. You know, the really useful stuff.
So I was delighted to stumble across this little book, Merde Encore! More of the Real French You Were Never Taught at School.
Written by a woman mysteriously known by her first name only, Genevieve, and illustrated by Michael Heath, it’s a sequel to their first volume, Merde!, which purports to enlighten the budding Francophile to the mysteries of French syntax.
Merde Encore! claims to have been written to meet the needs of the person who knows enough French to be comfortable in the language, but wants to be able to speak it colloquially, the way the French do.
What I learned from Mlle R., both privately and in school, provided an invaluable foundation on which I could build to a reasonable fluency, but it was formal, stilted French that immediately identified me as someone who had studied French but had never really lived in it. And it was still hard to follow an untranslated French film. Now I was ready for the real language.
This book is divided into 13 chapters:
The Musts: Common Everyday Musts and Absolute Musts, Including the Merde, Chier, Con, Ficher, and Foutre Families
Variations on a Theme: What an Idiot, What a Pain, I Don’t Give a Damn
The Body and its Functions: Parts, Bodily Functions, Body Types
The Weighty Matters of Love and Sex (National Obsession #1): The Protagonists, The Chase, Emotions and Conquest, Parties, Disasters
The No-less Weighty Matters of Food and Drink (National Obsession #2): Food, Drink
Hassling
Money Matters
Work and Social Status: Work and Jobs, Social Status and Political Affiliation
Indulging in Racism, Xenophobia, and Disrespect for One’s Elders
To Exit Rapidly
Positive Thinking
Foreign Invasions of the Language
Your Final Exam
I won’t go through every chapter, but a brief descriptions of a few of them will help you understand what you'll find here.
The Musts includes a list of nouns:
a bastard = un salopard
the john = les water, les chiottes
a jalopy, heap, wreck = un tacot
outsized boots or clothoppers = les écrase-merde [literally, shit-squashers]).
Adjectives include:
friendly and nice = sympa, as in sympathetique
disgusting = débectant, from débecter, to puke
ugly or lousy = moche.
Verbs include:
to grouse or gripe = rouspéter or râler
to have some nerve = avoir du culot or avoir de toupet
to be in a bad mood = tre de mauvais poil, tre mal vissé, or tre mal luné.
Then there are the "necessary bits and pieces," such as:
OK = d’ac (short for d’accord, agreed)
no way! = des clous! or tintin!
my ass! = mon cul!
All very helpful things to know.
This chapter also includes helpful pronunciation tips, and a set of sentences to translate from French to English and vice versa.
Under the heading of Absolute Musts, we first encounter the Merde family. Merde means, figuratively and literally, that which comes out of one’s hind end. In polite circles, it’s referred to as les cinq lettres, much as we refer to our "4-letter words." It’s not as impactful or shocking as its English equivalent (used to be) and is sprinkled liberally through conversations at all levels. There is a lively discussion of the various forms of the word: verbs, adjectives, and nouns.
Also included is the chier family. Chier is the verb that produces merde. (I’m trying to get past the word filter here.) It’s used to express intense irritation, and is given here in all its verb, noun, and adjectival glory.
And finally, we have ficher and foutre. They appear benign - to do, to give, to put - but they give a peculiar snap and crackle to conversation. So when you scare the hell out of someone, you foutre la trouille quelqu’un. And when you want to ask where the hell someone put the house keys, you ask Ou as-tu foutu les clef de la maison?
The chapter entitled Variations on a Theme covers three main themes, and is prefaced by a statement that most French people feel superior to their fellow men, including other French people. (Remember, this is a French woman writing this.) So the need for a vocabulary to express contempt for the inferiority of others is vast, as is the attendant choice of words and phrases. Under What an Idiot, there are nouns for nitwits, clods, twits, fools, degenerates, nutcases, scatterbrains, and worse.
Moving on to What a Pain, we have a vast selection of terms for someone who is boring, irritating, a pain, a drag, and so on.
And finally, when you want to say that you Don’t Give a Damn, there’s a list of terms you can use that cover the range of feelings from mild shrugs to more serious animosity.
And now we come to The Body and its Functions.
La carcasse (self-explanatory)
the head = le caillou
the nut = la citrouille (literally, the pumpkin, and isn’t it interesting that this most male of body parts is feminine gender?)
the nose or schnoz = le pif
the ticker = le palpitant; and
the paunch = la bedaine or la brioche (think about the shape of a brioche...)
This chapter includes the dirty words for body parts that junior high boys dug through their French books for. Well, here they are, in all their glory - every slang word you can think of for a primary or secondary sexual body part is here. There’s also a section on bodily functions, if you feel inclined to talk about them.
It’s tempting to go through the entire book and preview each section, because it’s remarkably complete, but this review would run to 30 pages if I tried. But I can’t stop here without mentioning two sections at the end of the book.
The first, entitled Frog Pathology, touches on issues of French belief and habit, the most interesting of which is, for me, hygiene. Mlle. Genvieve reveals here that the French reputation for a casual attitude toward personal hygiene is borne out by research; studies done by the French themselves showed that they use an average of 2½ bars of soap a year! And they buy toothbrushes at the rate of one for every three people per year. Fifty percent of them go to bed without brushing their teeth. Remember Napoleon’s famed message to Josephine when he was in Egypt, "Ne te lave pas, j’arrive." ("Don’t wash, I’m coming.") Then think about how long it would take to get from Egypt to France...
And finally, we come to Franglais. Entitled Appee Beurzdé tooh Yooh, a song which is sung the length and breadth of France on one’s natal anniversary, it lists some Frenchified words swiped from English, such as le blue-jean, le barbecue, le discount, le knock-out, le name-dropping, and le sex-appeal. (Interesting that all those borrowed words are masculine in gender.) Now, translate this sentence into English: Le look de la saison est un véritable patchwork de styles. See? You’re speaking French. Sort of.
My edition of Merde Encore! is quite old and has a different cover than the one shown here. (Mine is red, white, and blue, and shows an irritated man holding up his mucky shoe and yelling J'ai marché dans la merde! as his dog giggles behind him.) But the content remains. It's trade-paperback size, handy to tuck into a daypack or large purse when you travel. It includes some amusing cartoons that you'll probably be able to translate after you review the book. If you feel compelled to downrate me for reviewing a different edition, tu es un corniaud. Je m'en fous de ce que tu en penses.
Don’t get me wrong - I love French. I enjoy speaking the little I’ve retained since I last studied it in 1965. It’s fun to roll those wonderful gargles off your tongue, and classical French has a majesty, partly, I think due to the softness of its consonants, that more guttural or non-gargled languages lack. But after years of formal study of a language - any language - it’s nice to know that its native speakers have their own argot, their own way of flavoring their classical language to adapt it to their needs.
Some of the material in Merde Encore! will make sense to you only if you have some knowledge of French, but for the most part, it’s fun to browse through the book. I recommend it to anyone who wants to put the finishing touches to his or her grasp of this most formal and romantic language.
Recommended:
Yes
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