BEING bilingual makes swearing easier – according to an article in the Guardian this week. If we speak two languages, then we don’t feel the same gut wrenching stress associated with certain swear words or indeed, certain subject matter, in the second tongue. It’s much easier to turn the air blue in French, German, or Italian.
In the week that Article 50 was triggered, I’m missing the blue French that was cause for shock, horror and a giggle at school. In French, the verbs to kiss and to do a heck of a lot more get easily mixed up. So that when I translated the phrase, 'He kissed me' in front of the L6 class of 1978, reader, I got it very very wrong.
And just as we are sundering historic links with Europe, my message is that it is important to keep trying, even if you do not speak the lingo – you really should have a go.
That brings me to the case of my friend who was on holiday in la belle France not so long ago. She was sitting at a table in a bistro when she decided she would give them the pleasure of addressing them in their native tongue.
So she asked the waiter for a straw – you know – une pipe. At least, that’s what she thought she asked for in French.
The waiter fell about laughing and then he brought over his fellow waiters to share the joke. By this stage, she was mystified and could not understand the hilarity she had induced. It was only on her return home that we were able to set her right – it wasn’t a straw, she asked for, it was... well, given that this is a family newspaper, you're just going to have to google it.
Ah, the joys of swearing in another tongue and of bastardising said language. Summers at the Gaeltacht offered rich pickings. We butchered every beautiful Irish song there was.
A love song like: “A stor, a stor, a ghra,” did not deserve its crude translation of “I stole, I stole her bra.”
As for An Puc ar Buile – all ye who have spent a summer at the Gaeltacht know the words put to that. I have distinct memories of the headmaster touring the room and warning us that he’d be listening.
A few years later, I was a young student and keen but clueless au pair for a countess in a fancy French chateau. What with the daughter of the countess’s three small children and a daschund dog called Kiwi. I had my hands full. That sausage dog wee-weed all over the place.
That reminds me, they called the toilet the “petit coin” – the little corner – a neat little colloquialism along the lines of going to see a man about a dog.
The mother of the small children grew fond of me. Perhaps it was because I ate Countess Granny’s nettle soup and smacked my lips like I was enjoying it. She said she’d like to have her children grow up to be just like me.
I had, she pointed out, “quelquechose dans le ventre”. Literally that means I had something in the stomach... beyond huge doses of nettle soup.
I was aghast. Did she think I was pregnant? Oh, no, no, no – apparently, the phrase meant I had a lot of spirit. This language barrier, you never can tell.
Years later, as a journalist working in Paris, my serious French boss said that lots of foreign people – like the 30 of us newbies he was surrounded with – have trouble distinguishing between the polite form of the pronoun for 'you' in French – as in 'vous' – and the familiar form – 'tu'.
This is a French social minefield – to tutoyer someone can be grossly insulting. But, my boss reassured us, we could use tu because he understood. No problems.
Thus, one day I sailed into his office and tutoyed him – the look on his face was a picture. You’d think I’d asked for a straw in a French bistro.
All those tourists who spent a fortune queuing to see the Mona Lisa around the corner in the Louvre, might have had better value looking at his face that day.
C’est la vie. It’s April 1 – poisson d’avril in France. Children go around pinning paper fish to people as a joke. I love Europe, but some things just get lost in translation.
