Bad language

One factor that militates against my hopes for harmony, rather than conflict, among nations, is the way one group will insult another, which flings the same insults back at the first. 

Exploring this exciting subject is one of the great benefits of learning languages.

When I was studying Italian at college, I was told about a fellow student who’d just completed a PhD thesis about a region in the Italian Alps. Two valleys ran together at a small market town, the only point where the inhabitants of two villages, one up each valley, would meet when they came to sell their produce. At all other times, a spur of the mountains kept them firmly and practically insurmountably separated, even though they were only a couple of kilometres apart as the crow flies. 

If a crow could be persuaded to fly over that mountain.

He found that each spoke its own version of Italian. For instance, the modern definite article in Italian comes from the Latin for ‘that’, ‘illum’ in the masculine (OK, OK, I know that’s the accusative of ‘ille’, but the accusative is the root of the modern forms). Each syllable of the word has given an alternative form of the masculine definite article, ‘il’ and ‘lo’. In one of the villages, the ‘il’ form was used, in the other the ‘lo’.

What’s more, he also found that each village had a way of describing someone as completely mad, or possibly stupid, or even both. And, inevitably, that way was to say that they were like somebody from the other village.

While I was studying French, I was amused to discover that the French referred to what most countries now simply call condoms as ‘capotes anglaises’, ‘English overcoats’. The English, on the other hand, called them ‘French letters’. They are, or at least were, somehow disreputable, so each of the two countries liked to present them as foreign in their origins and, why not, place those origins in the other. 

Many years later, I did some research into one particular Frenchman, a scientist by the name of Maupertuis. I read a colossal number of his letters. I learned to recognise his handwriting without having to read his signature, and that was an extraordinary feeling: I felt I knew him with some intimacy even though he’d been dead for over 200 years.

As I was ploughing through those letters, I came across two that struck me as odd. He’d written them to a fellow scientist in England, a leading member of the Royal Society. “Thank you for the gift”, Maupertuis wrote. “I gave half to le Président Hénault,” a friend of his, “although I have far more need of them than he does.” And, he explained, that it was galling to have to turn to foreigners for the means to “protect our honour from the perils to which our beautiful women expose us”.

Suddenly I realised why it was the English called condoms French letters: it was because the French wrote letters to ask for them, and the English used letters to send them. Contraception was illegal throughout Christian Europe, but  Protestant countries were more inclined than Catholic ones to turn a blind eye to its use. Another researcher had looked into baptismal records from the Protestant Swiss canton of Geneva, and found that you could see families in which there would be a child, and a year or two later a second, and a year or two after that a third, and then no more. Clearly, some kind of family planning was taking place and I doubt very much that in many cases it was abstinence.

And ‘English overcoats’? It seems a good name for protectives “of our honour” that arrive from England. Not a bad euphemism at all.

All this came to mind the other day when I wandered into a bakery in the little town of Hoyo de Manzanares in the hills above Madrid, where I’m spending a few days helping to look after two of my grandchildren (more of that in another post). I hadn’t seen the baker for some time and asked her how she was doing, and in particular how things had worked out with the assistant I’d seen working there in the autumn.

“Se despidió a la francesa,” she told me. 

That literally means “he took French leave”. It’s the expression for leaving sneakily without any kind of farewell. “As soon as the meeting was over, I took French leave,” means that I got out after the discussion ended without saying goodbye to anyone.

Interestingly, the French equivalent is “filer à l’anglaise”. Literally that’s “rushing off in the English way”. Another fine example of different nations attributing something negative, in this instance bad manners, to others.

Despedirse a la francesa
Filer à l'anglaise
or... to take French leave 

Still, at least in this case the English can count on the support of the Spanish. It seems the French are outvoted two-to-one. A much-needed victory for the English in today’s Brexit times.

All the more so after the French recently came over and delivered an all-time record-breaking defeat, 53-10, to England’s rugby team at its headquarters and high temple, Twickenham.

Still. I’m a keen fan of harmony among nations. So there’s no way you’ll catch me saying that this was typical French callousness towards an opponent already down on its luck.

I’ll just say that we got royally screwed, if you’ll excuse my French.