When in French Read Online Free PDF Page B

the repeated associations it imposes on us—all these habits of speech can create habits of mind that affect more than merely the knowledge of language itself,” the linguist Guy Deutscher has written. We don’t call an arm an arm because it’s an arm; it’s an arm because we call it one. Language carves up the world into different morsels (a metaphor that a Russian speaker might refuse, as “carving,” in Russian, can only be performed by an animate entity). It can fuse appendages and turn bottles into cans.
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    A LMOST AS SOON AS I’D arrived in Geneva, I’d begun to feel the pull of French. Already, I was intrigued by the blend of rudeness and refinement, the tension between the everyday and the exalted, that characterized the little I knew of the language. “Having your cake and eating it too” was
Vouloir le beurre, l’argent, et le cul de la crémière
(“To want the butter, the money, and the ass of the dairywoman”).
Raplapla
meant “tired.” A
frileuse
was a woman who easily got cold.
La France profonde
, with its immemorial air, gave me chills in a way that “flyover country” didn’t. I found it incredible that Olivier found it credible that the crash of Air France Flight 447 in 2009 could have been in some part attributable to a breakdown in the distinction between
vous
(the second person formal subject pronoun) and
tu
(the second person informal). Before the crash, the airline had promoted what was referred to in the French press as an Anglo-Saxon-style management culture in which employees universally addressed each other as
tu
. The theory was that the policy had contributed to the creation of apower vacuum, in which no one could figure out who was supposed to be in charge.
    French was the language of Racine, Flaubert, Proust, and
Paris Match
. It wasn’t as if I were being forced to expend thousands of hours of my life in an attempt to acquire Bislama or Nordfriisk. Even if I had been, it would have been an interesting experiment, a way to try to differentiate between nature and nurture, circumstance and self. Learning the language would give me a raison d’être in Geneva, transforming it from a backwater into a hub of a kingdom I wanted to be a part of. I wasn’t living in France, but I could live in French.
    As long as I didn’t speak French, I knew that a membrane, however delicate, would separate me from my family. I didn’t mind being the comedy relative, birthing household appliances, but I sensed that the role might not become me for a lifetime. There were depths and shallows of intimacy I would never be able to navigate with a dual-language dictionary in hand. I didn’t want to be irrelevant or obnoxious. More than anything, I feared being alienated from the children Olivier and I hoped one day to have—tiny half-francophones who would cross their sevens and blow raspberries when they were annoyed, saddled with a Borat of a mother, babbling away in a tongue I didn’t understand. This would have been true in any language, but I sensed that it might be especially so in French, which in its orthodoxy seemed to exert particularly strong effects. “Do you want to see an Eskimo?” Saul Bellow wrote. “Turn to the
Encyclopédie Larousse
.”
    Our first New Year’s in Switzerland, Jacques and Hugo decided to visit.
    â€œThey said they want to come in the morning,” Olivier told me.
    â€œOkay. When?”
    â€œIn the morning.”
    â€œNo, but when?”
    â€œIn the morning!”
    Olivier, I could see, was starting to get exasperated. I was, too.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I said, a little too emphatically, as unable to reformulate my desire to know on which day of the week they would arrive as Olivier was to fathom another shade of meaning.
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘What do I mean?’ I meant exactly what I