In our earlier post,
we offered a linguistic deconstruction of a recent
incident in which which the éminence
grise of the Front National, Le
Pen père, uttered what was alleged by his detractors to be a Discouraging Word, disobliging
to la gent israélite. He denied this. (In earlier times, this incident might
have been settled among gentlemen, with swords, on the meadow at dawn; nowadays, we slug it out on TV.)
This evening, there was an interesting update.
“All
Things Considered” just broadcast a useful report from France by Eleanor
Beardsley. She asked a French rabbi whether he held the Front National
responsible for the upsurge of (sometimes violent) antisemitism in France. “He just laughed”: The perps in the recent attacks, he
explained, are overwhelmingly immigrant “Muslim, African, and North African” --
less FN than FLN, as it were. As
for the FN, it is more worried about precisely that population, than about
long-assimilated Jews.
Politics-and-language note:
That piece, though it did not go deep, was
somewhat startling in actually naming ethnicities, rather than just referring
to “des jeunes”, which is the French media codeword when Maghrebis get out of
line. (Off course, this may
have less to do with any courage on the part of NPR, than the fact that the
roster of taboo topics differs
from country to country.) Additionally, Ms Beardsly added another bit of
profiling, when she reported that, at the end of a recent demonstration, “the
male protesters” broke loose can commited acts of vandalism. Not: “the protesters, who were mostly men” or what have you. In fact, the detail added is in
some ways so odd (particularly since the issues here, unlike those of the
counter-demonstrations relating to the Mariage
pour tous, are by no means gender-related) , that I wonder whether it was
not so much a swipe at the masculine gender, as a crytpo-French reference to, precisely, “les jeunes” (al-shabaab), and thus covertly ethnic in reference.
[Update 9 August 2014] As mentioned, in French media-speak, des jeunes is code for ‘misbehaving
Maghrebis’ -- what the American media call “inner-city youth” -- except that,
in France, they are rather ‘outer-city’
youth, since they live in what, topographically,
Americans would call “the suburbs”, but which, sociographically, is quite other than that: la
banlieue, the barely-policeable belt around Paris -- think of it as the
inner city turned inside out.
Within the banlieue, you will
find the cités, referenced above. And this morning, this new bit of
French political semantics, courtesy of Le Figaro:
De la banlieue
rouge à la banlieue «verte» ?
La banlieue du
chanteur Renaud a disparu.
The rouge (‘Red’) refers to Communist (Stalinist) influence: it is a metaphor that the whole world
borrowed from the Bolsheviks, after the Russian use. But the verte
-- the ‘Green’?
My first thought was that it
referred to les écolos -- and indeed,
there are pockets of (let us call it) Ecocentrism
out in the banlieue as well, mixed in with everything else. That is the only sense now
current in America (“Go Green!” -- in your grandfather’s day, it referred
rather to greenhorns -- newbies to
you). But that is not it.
The headline goes on:
Les anciens
bastions du PCF ont cédé face à la montée du communautarisme musulman.
Ah…. ha! The reference is actually to Muslim
identity-politics, coded by the color made especially familiar by
Gaddhafi (he brandished his little Green Book, a counterpart to
Mao’s Little Red Book). This is not an essentially French usage; it is being borrowed from another
culture. And while the association of green with Islam is
widespread, it is not the only color-code in play: Hizbollah uses (green
on) yellow; al-Qaeda and ISIL use (white on) black. So if you ever
see a forest of green banners marching towards your cul-de-sacs, relax:
it might have been worse.
[Update 10 August 2014] We suggested above that the
somewhat “off”-sounding “male demonstrators” might have been in part a
crypto-Gallicism, unconsciously inspired by the special contemporary French
political use of the codeword les jeunes. A similar apparent case of
unconscious loan-translation appears in this morning’s New York Times,
datelined Paris. In prose reminiscent of a high-end menu, as gooey
and thick as pâté de foie gras, we read of a state-subsidized (and rather louche-sounding) real-estate speculator,
remaking the Marais section of Paris
(“one of the city’s trendiest” districts, the reporter reassures us, lest some
francophone-capable American readers hesitate to venture into a section whose
name literally means ‘swamp, morass’) into an “Epicurean Village” (epicurean not in the sense of
the ataraxia of Ἐπίκουρος,
but of self-indulgent sybarites):
“It’s going to be totally designed,
with a library so people can think about the meat.”
(I blink. Did the sentence really say that?
Let’s re-read it slowly:
It’s
going
to be
totally
designed,
with a
library
so
people can think
…
so people can think
so people can think
…
so
people can think
…
about the meat.
Yep, that’s what it says all right.)
Quoting the silk-scarve bedraped entrepreneur, our
blithe and flighty reporter goes on:
“Over
there will be the cheesemonger, where
the cheese will be hidden in designer drawers, and taken out and explained.”
All right -- now I’ve lost the readers’
confidence; you must think I’m
making this up. So here’s the
link; go see for yourself:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/world/europe/an-epicurean-village-is-too-rich-for-some-paris-appetites.html?ref=world
One pictures the scene: “You, cheesemonger!
Explain that cheese!”
Our reporter continue, this time in her own prose,
rather than that of the sleek little Frenchman:
Fashionably
dressed butchers, …
(Actually we must pause here, overcome. “Fashionably dressed butchers”, what an
image. Trendily attired
plumbers; dishwasher-repairmen in
gay raiment … -- Let’s try again.)
Fashionably
dressed butchers, bakers, and restaurateurs will work in an upscale collective --
(No, sorry,
got to pause again for breath.
A “collective” -- shades of those olden times in Berkeley! But -- faut préciser -- an upscale
collective. Très chic. -- Truly, today’s
feminized-and-yuppifed New York Times is priceless. --- Let’s try one more time:)
Fashionably
dressed butchers, bakers, and restaurateurs will work in an upscale collective, dominated by the principal of zero waste,
[ => “The Principle of
Zero Waste” <= ]
peddling
[Is that really the verb you want? -- Copy editor] high-concept foods from mod
spaces …
(“High-concept foods” -- “Mod spaces”. Can’t make this stuff up. -- Well, she can. -- To resume: )
…
high-concept foods from mod spaces, using
biological products sourced only from French farmers.
(We fall exhausted on our labors.)
Anyhow, en
tant que philologue, allow me
to draw your attention to that phrase, “biological products”. For the average American reader,
I suspect, that does not have quite the effect that the gushing author
intended. To the ear of the
anglo-saxon (as the French call us), that sounds suspiciously like a tissue
sample, or an excretion, or something suspected in an ebola outbreak. But what is really meant is what,
in the preceding paragraph, she styled more idiomatically as “farm-fresh gastronomy” (semantically,
there is a bit of an enallege adjectivi
there, since what is “farm-fresh” here is not really the gastronomy, but the food
which the gastronomes are shoving down their pie-holes, washed down with a nice
chablis; but let that pass). The sense, surely, is an
unconscious semantic loan-translation from French biologique: it means ‘natural, organic’, and (among the trendy) is
usually abbreviated bio (as in : des produits bio; the
modifier does not inflect for number or gender).
(Enough, enough. Epicurean village delenda est. Times, cancel my subscription.)
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