Repeatedly disappointed by Le Monde, I switched to
daily checking of Le Figaro instead. It often reports news of interest that I haven’t seen
reported elsewhere -- things the
Left abjures, because politically-incorrect, and which the American Right
abjures, because their knowledge of and interest in Abroad is limited to
occasionally peering across the Bering Strait (“Russia … You can see it from
here,” in the words of one of the Republicans’ senior stateswomen). Additionally, the readers’ comments
tend to be quite literate and witty, and lend themselves to quotation to
illustrate new usages in the ever-evolving French tongue.
However, just as a subscription to the print edition of the
Sunday New York Times (which I maintain, years after having moved out of
the Northeast) inevitably brings with it, wrapped inside more serious sections
like a dogturd in a pooper-scooper bag, the egregious, the ineffable “Style”
section, addressed to the mindless with too much money (and which must be
extracted with tweezers, while wearing elbow-length plastic gloves), so subscription to the Figaro newsletter
brings with it the bling-bling scraps & scrapings from its gynecocentric
supplement, Madame Figaro.
Yet today, the thumbnail come-on offered a new word I’d
never seen: pipolade.
Tranches de pipolade
Jude Law, Madonna, Brad Pitt... Ce
que les people nous ont fait savoir cette semaine... et dont on aurait très
bien pu se passer.
You can view the word in action here, if you don’t mind a
spot of brain-damage:
(Well, let us not be too harsh: they did after all add that wise proviso, “dont on aurait
très bien pu se passer”.)
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
Nook lovers are book
lovers!
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
So what is “pipolade”? The etymon is evidently the English or rather the
American word people -- yet, not as
in “We the People”, but as in … People magazine, trail-blazer in the
decline of American letters. The
word thus means “glitzy gossipy tidbits from the world of empty celebrities”. The celebrities in question (as
here, all three featured) are mostly American, whence the appropriateness of
the American etymology.
The word People
itself is used appositionally/asyndetically in the Madame section of Le Figaro, things like
La semaine people
Michelle Obama tout près de Dustin
Hoffman, Amanda Seyfried trop proche de Hugh Jackman, Diane Kurger très loin de
Quentin Tarantino…
Now -- Why bother to serve up such a trifle? You don’t really need to add this odd
word to your active vocabulary.
But it does nicely illustrate a trait of French, active for well over a
century: namely, to borrow
Anglo-American lexical Kulturgut in a quirky Gallicized form,
deliberately distorted:
acknowledging their interest in the doings of the perfides anglais (and now the amerloques loufoques) while
maintaining a certain hexagonal integrity, by dressing up the word in a
jester’s cap and bells; as though
to say: this we simply toy with,
the Académie française will never ratify this.
Pour nos essais
en langue
la plus châtiée qui
soit,
checkez-out …..
To give a further sense of the flavor of this frileux variety of Languages in Contact,
compare another … not borrowing,
exactly, since the word exists nowhere outside of France, but Anglo-Franco hippogriff, appearing on
the same page of the trusty Le Robert & Collina Super Senior (the
dictionary title being itself a rather larky-sounding Anglico-Gallico
confection) in which I am
dligently writing-in our new arrival: pipi-room.
Mmmyes; you
heard that right. Along with the
idiom aller au pipi-room. Glossed with the British equivalents
(equivalent both referentially and in playfulness) “loo” and “to go and spend a
penny”. And indeed, this pipi undoubtedly played a role in the
lexicogenesis of pipolade, marrying
up with people in a ceremony
presided-over by things like limonade
and rigolade…
There is a curious anglo-babytalk parallel in German: Pipi-pause
(‘pit stop’). It looks English
but, like pipi-room, is not. This sort of coy/twee
playing-around with expressions for the urinary function (reminiscent of
playing-around with the Wiwi-macher itself) have parallels in British English
and (abundantly, though with a different twist) Australian English, but not
really in adult American, which typically sticks to a certain surly
onomatopoiea.
In summary, re pipolade: This, then, is the sort of
bend-sinister offspring of unmarriageable parents, in which the American doyen
of Romance Philology, Yakov Malkiel (may God receive his soul), with his keen
ear for linguistic playfulness, used to delight.
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
[Update 15 December 2012] A link to the following appeared in my mailbox this morning:
Bar Refaeli, Pink,
Rihanna, Baptiste Giabiconi… Les people
se sont mis à nu sur Twitter
Note the use of les
people in the sense of ‘pop celebrities’. But what of this strip-tweet? Is it a genuine/common American phrase,
borrowed into French? Or is it
like pipi-room, scum villages, et cetera, confected from American spare parts, in a
Gallic mould?
A Google search found, zwar, plenty of instances of contiguous strip plus tweet -- but most of them had nothing to do with the usage here,
but occur in contexts like “… Sunset Strip. Tweet …”
Well, I don’t use Twitter, nor track celebs, so U B the
judge.
*
Pour d’autres
friandises
de la confiserie
du docteur Justice,
consultez:
*
[Update 24 January 2013] Meanwhile, the guardians of the linguistic
citadel wage a battle of Sprachreinigung
(hygiène du langage) , as they have done
since the eighteenth century:
Le Journal officiel du 23 janvier
préconise d'user du terme «mot-dièse»
au lieu de «hashtag». Sur le réseau
social, on se gausse de ces combats perdus d'avance.
That is, instead of the word in international use, which is
composed of two familiar English words but which, for all I know, may actually
have been coined in Finland or Japan, French-speakers are urged to call it a ‘sharp’.
*
Si cela vous parle,
savourez la série
noire
en argot authentique
d’Amérique :
*
[Update 11 May 2014] The latest from “Madame Figaro” (by far the worst offender):
Les baskets
slip-on gagnent du terrain
Des motifs arty,
du cuir, du poulain, du raphia... La tendance mix & match a tissé sa toile
sur la reine du street wear.
For more re such gynecomorphic bobo-talk, this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/08/bon-chic-bon-bio.html
No comments:
Post a Comment