When in French Read Online Free PDF

be outside of.
    The consolation prize of Geneva was the
grande
boucherie
—a ninety-five-year-old emporium of shanks and shoulders andshins, aging woodcocks and unplucked capons, their feet the watery blue of a birthmark. The steaks were festooned with cherry tomatoes and sprigs of rosemary. The aproned butchers, surprisingly approachable for people of their level of expertise, would expound on the preparation of any dish. One day, craving steak tacos—Geneva’s Mexican place only had pork ones, and a single order cost forty dollars—I convinced Olivier, who wasn’t big on cooking, to chaperone me to the
boucherie
. I explained to him that I wanted to buy a
bavette de
flanchet
, the closest thing I had been able to find to a flank steak, after Googling various permutations of “French” and “meat.”
    â€œBonjour, monsieur,” Olivier said. “On voudrait un flanchet, s’il vous plait.”
    The butcher rifled around in the cold case, his fingers grazing handwritten placards:
rumsteak, entrecôte, tournedos, joue de boeuf
.
Ronde de gîte, paleron, faux-filet.
    â€œMalheureusement, je n’ai pas de flanchet aujourd’hui,” he said. “En fait, on n’a généralement pas de flanchet.”
    â€œWhat?” I said.
    â€œHe doesn’t have a flank steak.”
    The butcher reached into the case and pulled out a small, dark purse of beef.
    â€œJe vous propose l’araignée. C’est bien savoureux, comme le flanchet, mais plus tendre.”
    â€œWhat did he say?”
    â€œHe has an
araignée
.”
    â€œWhat is that?”
    â€œNo idea.
Araignée
means spider.”
    â€œOkay, whatever, take it.”
    â€œBon, ça serait super.”
    The
araignée
is the muscle that sheathes the socket of a cow’s hock bone, so called because of the strands of fat thatcrisscross its surface like a cobweb. In francophone Switzerland, as in France, it is a humble but cherished cut. Different countries, I was surprised to learn, have different ways of dismantling a cow: an American butcher cuts straight across the carcass, sawing through the bones, but a French
boucher
follows the body’s natural seams, extracting specific muscles. (American butchers are faster, but French butchers use more of the cow.) If you were to look at an American cow, in cross section, it would be a perfectly geometric Mondrian. A French cow is a Kandinsky, all whorls and arcs. You can’t get a porterhouse in Geneva, any more than you can get an
araignée
in New York: not because it doesn’t translate, but because it doesn’t exist.
    A flank steak, I would have assumed, is a flank steak, no matter how you say it. We think of words as having one-to-one correspondences to objects, as though they were mere labels transposed onto irreducible phenomena. But even simple, concrete objects can differ according to the time, the place, and the language in which they are expressed. In Hebrew, “arm” and “hand” comprise a single word,
yad
, so that you can shake arms with a new acquaintance. In Hawaiian, meanwhile,
lima
encompasses “arm,” “hand,” and “finger.”
    In a famous experiment, linguists assembled a group of sixty containers and asked English, Spanish, and Mandarin speakers to identify them. What in English comprised nineteen jars, sixteen bottles, fifteen containers, five cans, three jugs, one tube, and one box was, in Spanish, twenty-eight
frascos
, six
envases
, six
bidons
, three
aerosols
, three
botellas
, two
potes
, two
latas
, two
taros
, two
mamaderos
, and one
gotero
,
caja
,
talquera
,
taper
,
roceador
, and
pomo
. Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, identified forty
ping
, ten
guan
, five
tong
, four
he
, and a
guan
.
    â€œThe concepts we are trained to treat as distinct, the information our mother tongue continuously forces us to specify, the details it requires us to be attentive to, and