French political language

Lost in translation

A glossary of new French doublespeak

Jan 12th 2013 | PARIS |From the print edition

A TIMELY gift landed unexpectedly on The Economist’s desk during the holidays.

Entitled “Lost in Translation: a glossary of new French doublespeak”, it offers a handy

guide to decoding political speech under François Hollande’s Socialist government. Both

the left and the right in France have a tradition of disguising policy with woolly or

euphemistic turns of phrase. Lionel Jospin, a Socialist prime minister, for instance,

privatised more companies than his right-wing predecessors without ever using the word,

preferring “opening up the capital”. For those bemused by the linguistic ambiguity of Mr

Hollande’s team, here are some helpful extracts from the glossary:

Sécurisation de l’emploi (improving job security): phrase used to launch current labour-

market negotiations, designed to introduce more flexibility (see banned words).

Partenaires sociaux (social partners): unions and bosses who do such negotiating, not to

be confused with dating, square-dancing, doubles tennis etc.

Flexibilité (flexibility): outlawed word prompting grim visions of unregulated Anglo-Saxon

free-for-all (see Libéral).

Laissez-faire: iffy Anglo-Saxon phrase with no place in French (see Libéral).

Redressement des comptes publics (putting right the public finances): budget cuts and

tax increases, never combined with austérité or rigueur (see banned words). Not to be

confused with…

Redressement du pays dans la justice (putting right the country with justice): soaking the

rich with taxes. Not to be confused with…

Redressement productif (productive renewal): name of ministry responsible for stopping

industrial closures, or failure thereof (see Florange, Peugeot).

Plan social (redundancy plan resulting from aforementioned factory closures): job losses,

not to be confused with organisation of social life, bars, clubs etc.

Modernisation de l’action publique (modernisation of public action): eliminating public-

sector inefficiencies, elsewhere known as budget cuts.

Nécessité d’équilibrer financièrement les retraites (Need to balance pension funds):

pension reform looms again.

Minable (pathetic): departure of French national who considers taxes too high (see

Depardieu, G).

Social-démocrate (social democrat): moderately acceptable form of Scandinavian-style

Socialist.

Social-libéral (social liberal): suspicious form of pseudo-Socialist who embraces free-

marketry.

Libéral (liberal): rare species with dodgy Anglo-Saxon motives, set on undermining

French way of life (don’t see Frédéric Bastiat).

Ultra-libéral (ultra-liberal): beyond the pale, eg, The Economist.

Claudia Pritchard: Pardon my French, but, vraiment, who needs it?

They leapt and wept as their results came through, GCSE students last week, A-level candidates the week before, and the sages looked on and frowned. The pass rate for French is down! The civilised world is at an end. Over. La fin.

Well, actually, no. French? Who needs it? The language of diplomacy? I doubt much French is being used at the Ecuadorian embassy. (And why is that man called Assange, like a French verb? Assanger – to be a repellent creep. "Il m'a assangé, m'lud …")

The language of good food? Hardly. It's all coq. Otherwise the menu runs thus: meat, meat, meat, cream, cheese. You don't need to have read Saint-Exupéry in the original (which I have) to navigate that. What kind of language needs three vowels for one spotty egg? Oeuf is not a word, it's an exhalation. Every French vowel is pronounced "uuh", like a dying breath. That makes breakfast uuh-uuh-uuh-f and buns. Oh grow up.

French is also unsingable. Never in the history of music has a choir started the Shepherds' Farewell from Berlioz's L'enfance du Christ without going flat by bar 10. French lacks consonants, the crampons of intelligible speech. There is a river in Pas-de-Calais called the Aa. (The "a" is silent.) This is inadequate. Worse, it is not possible to say Reims other than by clearing your nose without a hankie.

The language of style? Let us turn to nature's dainty, the dandelion: known in Czech as pampeliska, in Hungarian as pitypang, and even in galumphing German as the Hundeblume. And what do our Gallic friends opt for? Pissenlit. Wee-in-the-bed. Charmed, I'm sure.

No one in the world speaks French if they can help it. In African countries, there is invariably a beautiful local language. In Quebec, perhaps out of deference to the continual rain, French became the primary language in 1977. Nowadays, you are taken out and shot by Mounties if you do not start your conversation with "Bonjour", although using only consonants and no vowels at all. But, that formality out of the way, it's

straight back to good old global English, and not a wet bed in sight.

The Académie française exists to preserve this moribund language, which has a phrase for squalid teatime liaisons (oh yes, that would be French, wouldn't it?) – the cinq à sept. This is sex by numbers, before anyone pipes up in defence of the language of love. And yet there is no word for Friday-to-Sunday. Le weekend? Le find-your-own-pigging-word.

And what do we get for mastering this spitting gurgle? Contempt, from every native French speaker. Bill Bryson describes the look of revulsion at the boulangerie when he asks for a loaf of bread, and the disdain with which the shopkeeper slaps on to the counter the dead beaver he has requested. Compare this with Italy, where, at your very first stumbling "Bwon-jaw-neo", the Italian gasps with pleasure and surprise and asks which part of his country you come from.

So should we despair that Spanish and Mandarin are up and French is down? Pas du tout. We can keep the best bits – Balzac, ballet terms – and forget the rest.

The French language

Sarkozy can't speak proper

French politicians take on their own language Jan 13th 2011 | PARIS |From the print edition

MOST political leaders struggle to speak fluently in a foreign tongue. Only the

exceptional manage to mangle their own. Step forward France's president, Nicolas

Sarkozy. Last year, in a written parliamentary question, François Loncle, an opposition

deputy, said the president “mistreated” the French language with his endless

grammatical slips and “vulgar expressions”. He urged the government to “take all

necessary steps” to put an end to the president's “attacks on the culture of our country

and its reputation in the world.”

Now the education minister, Luc Chatel, has finally replied. In a letter leaked to the

French press, though oddly not published in parliamentary records, Mr Chatel denied

that the president abused the French tongue. Rather, he argued, Mr Sarkozy uses a

“clear and real” form of language, which reflects his “proximity” and “spontaneity” with the

people. Mr Chatel added that the president specifically avoids “amphigoric style and

syntactic convolution”.

When he was first elected in 2007 Mr Sarkozy's fondness for verbs over abstract nouns,

and colloquial phrases over official waffle, felt refreshing. He may not have a literary

mind, a virtue prized by the Paris elite. But by omitting the “ne” in a negative sentence, or

employing café slang, he merely uses French as it is spoken and texted. In France,

however, a nation defined in part by its language, the purists have been aghast. The

Académie Française was set up in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu to codify and regulate the

French tongue. In the year to April 2010 the language police from the Professional

Advertising Regulatory Authority checked 36,000 ads for proper use of French, and

ordered 919 corrections.

In recent months, in line with a more presidential tone, Mr Sarkozy has made more of an

effort. In a televised interview in November, after he reshuffled the government, he even

nailed the fiendishly difficult imperfect subjunctive: “J'aurais aimé qu'il restât” (I would

have liked him to have stayed).

Mr Sarkozy is not the only French politician to wrestle with the language. Some fail to

make adjectives agree with nouns, or conjugate verbs improperly. Others simply slip up

while their minds are apparently elsewhere. Brice Hortefeux, the interior minister,

recently referred to “génitales” (genital) rather than “digitales” (digital) fingerprints. And in

a discussion about the economy, Rachida Dati, formerly justice minister, coolly said

“fellation” (fellatio) instead of “inflation”.