When in French (20 page)

In 1984—this really was the year—the Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation hired the linguist Thomas A. Sebeok to try to solve the problem of “nuclear semiotics”: how to warn the humans ten thousand years in the future that they would be
treading on radioactive wastelands. Sebeok produced a report titled
Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia
. In it, he rejected electrical signals (they needed an uninterrupted power supply), olfactory messages (they wouldn't last long enough), pictograms (they would be as ambiguous as cave paintings are to us), and simply rendering the message in every known language and sign system (even if one of them managed to survive, it would have decayed beyond comprehensibility). The best hope, he concluded, would be to initiate an “atomic priesthood” of storytellers, charged with perpetuating over three hundred generations a folklore of danger that would last as long as uranium.

 • • • 

T
O GET TO
THE WORD
FACTORY
, you cross the Seine at the Pont du Carrousel, wade through the Jardin des Tuileries—gravel gone porridgy in the late-fall dank—and take a right at the Louvre onto rue Saint-Honoré. Number 182 is the Ministry of Culture and Communication, situated in a former warehouse clad in a silvery mesh that recalls a cross between chain mail and fishnet stockings. On a November morning, blown-up photographs of the soldiers of 1914 filled the ground-floor windows, advertising the launch of an online archive that would allow citizens to search for their forebears among the dead of France. Public bikes serried near the entrance. Passing under a tumid
tricolore
, I went in and approached the information desk, explaining to the officer behind it that I was there for a 9:45 meeting. When he asked for a piece of identification, I produced a card that read “Füherausweis
—
Permis de conduire
—
Licenza di condurre
—
Permiss da manischar—Driving Licence.” It featured my face, overlaid by holographic Swiss crosses. My
last name was Irish. My middle name was German. I was speaking French, a language in which people often thought Lauren—easily confusable with Laurent—referred to a man.

It was always a strange thing, handing over my Swiss permit. All it technically said was that I was authorized to drive a motor vehicle in any of Switzerland's twenty-six cantons, with or without a trailer, but it seemed to mean much more. I wondered why passports and drivers' licenses are objects of such fascination; why we are apt to pass them around, giggling at one another's expressions, scrutinizing birthdates, rapt at such banalities as eye color and height; why a friend's headshot and some fine print are a source of sure entertainment, when no one ever begs to see another vacation slide. Something about identity cards is summary—your life on a slab of plastic, a quick-reference tabulation of who you are. I had chosen the Swiss license from my growing collection, leaving its American and British counterparts in their leather slots. Its air of mystery seemed appropriate to my mission. I felt like a spy.

I took an elevator, got off, and proceeded to a glassed-in conference room, where a quartet of long tables had been arranged in a rectangle. I found my name card—
COLLINS
capitalized in that insistently classificatory French way—and sat down in a chair upholstered in nubby purple fabric. The room began to fill with people: a mustachioed man wearing a tweed blazer, flowered socks, and cat's-eye glasses; a woman in a navy blue pussycat-bow blouse and a hat that looked like a cake. At 9:45 sharp, the chairman called the meeting to order, welcoming the members and guests of the Délégation Générale à la Langue Française's Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologie.

The Académie Française, contrary to widespread belief,
does not actually come up with the thousands of new words that ascend to the status of official French every year. Instead, the task falls to the CGTN, a governmental body whose sole purpose is to contrive French replacements for foreign interlopers. (They are almost always English.) The process begins in small committees, where lay experts generate alternatives to whatever terms have recently become popular or necessary in their fields. They make their suggestions to the CGTN, which assesses them and sends them to the Académie Française for a preliminary opinion. The words that survive then undergo a second round of vetting in committee, which culminates in the academy's approval, usually pro forma, upon which the Ministry of Culture and Communication publishes them in an annual report. A constitutional court ruled in 1994 that the state couldn't force private citizens or media organizations to say
façonneur d'image
for “spin doctor,” or
beuverie express
instead of “binge drinking,” but the terms are binding for public employees. Most languages evolve in a haphazard way. France, however, expends a great deal of money and manpower in an attempt to rationalize the process. Where English is a disinterested capitalist system—may the best word win, be it
bodega
or
feng shui
—French is a proudly
dirigiste
state.

The agenda for the day was the second-round discussion of words relating to the economy and to chemistry.

“We'll start with the list of economic terms,” the chairman said, speaking into a small microphone.

The first term,
acteur planétaire
, a calque for “global player,” passed without much objection. Next up was
comme si de rien n'était
—literally, “as if nothing was”—which was being proposed as a substitute for “business as usual.” The
phrase yielded 479,000 hits on Google, excluding mentions, a handout noted in all seriousness, of the album by Men at Work.

“What do we think, members of the General Commission?” the chairman began. “The question we have been asked is to decide whether or not, in all contexts,
comme si rien n'était
is the best translation possible.”

Seventeen hands went up.

“
Comme si rien n'était
doesn't seem very flexible,” the first speaker said.

“
Comme si rien n'était
is too informal,” the man in the fun socks added. “It's not at the same syntactical level as ‘business as usual,' nor is it in the same register.”

He continued to speak, twirling a nub of a pencil. “We have to find a translation that's more stable, and if we don't, it will become habit in the French language to say ‘business as usual.' I worry that the pronunciation for francophones is particularly difficult.” He spoke the phrase in English, bombinating the
s
's like a honeybee on a bloom. “So we have to find something else, and maybe it should be
comme d'habitude
, because that's the exact expression. It's a little more neutral, and a little more likable, and a little more familiar for this type of discourse.”

“He's the star of French lexicography,” the man on my right whispered. “You know that, right?”

I did not. But I thought that the celebrity lexicographer made a wise point.
Comme si rien n'était
was clunky. Worse, it was literal. It missed the cynicism, the very faint whiff of distrust, that presumably made “business as usual” a favorite idiom of the world of commerce. The point of the phrase, it seemed to me, was that it often implied the perpetuation of an abnormal, or at least unattractive, situation.

Curiously, the committee didn't seem to include many people who had a more than scholastic fluency in English. I was dying to interject, being in possession—merely by birth—of information that others in the room lacked. My national status (I didn't want to look like a rude American) dueled with my linguistic one (French was a language I was going to have to speak). There, in the forge of French language, words were being purpose-built. Was I going to sit by as the committee signed off on faulty prototypes that would soon be flogged to the world's 220 million French speakers?

To watch words get made was to bear witness to an elemental mystery, a moment whose aftermath was as imposing as its origins were supposed to be invisible—the sarsens going up at Stonehenge, the legend taking shape around the campfire. The pedants were also sorcerers, practitioners of a hieratic art. Everything could already be said, but it hadn't been said in the style of their sect, which was why they had to exist.
Comme si rien n'était
was a joke being told for the very first time.

The discussion continued, voices rising. Somebody said that no one even used “business as usual.” The next speaker countered that people, especially at big law firms, used it all the time. One woman proposed
dans la continuité
; another liked
sans changement
; another said that since
comme si rien n'était
couldn't be deployed as an adjectival phrase, as “business as usual” often was in English—“a business-as-usual attitude” was the example given—it presented “a singular complication.” It didn't occur to the committee members that no one was stopping them from using it as an adjectival phrase if they felt like it. Their extravagant authority coupled with their creative austerity, their reluctance to wield it boldly, seemed to pose as fundamental a French paradox as gorging on foie gras and not getting fat.

 • • • 

T
HERE IS A FLAWED
YET
persistent idea in French, dating to the foundation of the Académie Française, that every word has a single definition, and that every definition corresponds to a single word. The rigorous Cartesian education that is the birthright of the
citoyen
makes itself felt not only in the language but also in the way it's wielded, as though there were no problem that the correct application of logic, the proper progression of steps, cannot solve. Watching the committee trying to bend an English phrase to fit the strictures of French—“If it's not French, it's not clear,” they seemed to be saying, inverting Rivarol—I apprehended, at last, the structural underpinnings of the impasses at which Olivier and I often stalled. In English, I was seeking consensus—mirroring Olivier's concerns, wanting to meet in the middle. He was pursuing the right answer, in the conviction that there always was one. If I was performing a close reading, he was solving a proof.

After nearly an hour of debate, the committee was still torn.

“The truth is, in the field of economy I don't see a systematic use of this expression,” one of the members admitted.

Someone attempted a last-ditch effort to solidify support for
sans changement
.

“It's a good suggestion, but it would need to be agreed upon by the majority of the members of the commission,” the chairman ruled. “I think it is a subject we can revisit. Does everyone agree to move on to other terms?”

Most of the other words passed muster fairly easily. “Hot desking,” in a matter of minutes, morphed to
partage de bureau.
“Fun business”—perhaps the Jerry Lewis of economics terms, cherished abroad but ignored at home—was christened
travail amusant
. Straightforwardly enough, “offshoring” became
délocalisation
. But its entourage of spin-offs—“onshoring,” “homeshoring,” “nearshoring”—gave the committee pause. The working group had suggested that “nearshoring,” for example, be rendered
délocalisation dans un pays proche
.

“The question is, what is the definition of ‘close'?” one of the members asked. “The concept of ‘close' is not very well-defined.”

It had been three hours. The committee briefly adjourned. During the break, the man to my right introduced himself. He was Vincent, a linguistics professor from Lyon. His specialty, it turned out, was lexical blending: the formation of words like
fugly
and
spork
.

Every compound or blended word, he explained, demonstrates what is called “headedness”—one of its elements overpowers the other with regard to how the word will be defined. In English, “rightheadedness” prevails: a photosafari is a safari, not a photograph. French generally works the other way around, so that
carburéacteur
(
carburant
+
réacteur
) is jet fuel, rather than a fueled jet.

Maybe this had something to do with why the committee was getting so hung up, why it was unable to see the shores for the nears. French, I felt, didn't need to be able to say “nearshoring.” The term existed because it could, because the blocks were there and someone had built it. Why make a plumcot unless you've got a bunch of plums on hand?

When the meeting resumed, we turned to the chemistry terms.
Adiabatique
,
diathermane
,
différence de potentiel électrique de cellule
. I relaxed, letting the words wash over me, a language within a language, once again obscure.

“Madame Collins?” I heard the chairman say.

He was asking for my opinion as to whether
absorption modulée en pression
did justice to the term “pressure swing absorption,” a technique for purifying gas.

I straightened my back, tapped my microphone, and looked out at the group.

“Je n'en ai aucune idée,” I said, confessing, in irreproachable French, that I hadn't the slightest idea.

 • • • 

O
LIVIER SAID TO MEET
HIM
at the hardware store, the first door on the south after turning east at the light. When I got there, he had already bought what he needed. It was raining, nearly time for lunch. We walked a few blocks and ducked into an indoor market. The northern aisle was full of vendors: a butcher; a
charcutier
; a fishmonger, his wares laid out on ice. We stopped and called to the southwest side of the counter, where he was filleting a perch.

“Five hundred grams of smoked salmon, please?”