Remembrance of things

When you travel to France, you'll see signs like this everywhere. What does RAPPEL mean? Obviously, "slow down," right? Ummm...

It doesn't mean "straighten me up" either

After seeing RAPPEL for the thousandth time, I finally looked it up. It means "reminder" or "recall." Aha! Appeler means to call (as in Je m'appelle Brian, "I call myself Brian"), so rappel is literally "re-call." How elegant. And it brings us to an interesting point. In France, one of the responsibilities of a driver is to know, by heart, a table of the standard speed limits on various types of roads. That means, in turn, that a driver has no excuse for not knowing what the speed limit on a given road is. The word RAPPEL on a sign means "You should already know this; this sign does not indicate a departure from the previous regime." How admirably tough-minded.

Careful with that eggplant, Eugene

Although my brain can never tell me where the checkbook is, it does a super job of retaining facts of questionable value, such as that people in the U.K. call eggplants "aubergines." They also call zucchinis "vegetable marrows," which makes me even less excited about eating them. But I digress.

On one of our first visits to France, I saw a cheerful roadside sign declaring Auberge de Jeunesse. "Aha," I thought, "I seem to remember that jeune means young, so that must be some kind of restaurant: The Eggplant of Youth. I bet it serves some kind of extremely sincere vegetarian food and has colorful plates."

Then I saw several more such signs, in a variety of settings and formats. Ummm, a chain of restaurants? A sincere chain? Eventually, I was moved to crack a dictionary. Auberge, it turns out, means inn or hostel. So une auberge de jeunesse means, of course, a youth hostel.

This is exactly the sort of ridiculous error that is God's way of telling one to start a blog. So: Bonjour, mes amis. I've got plenty more errors coming your way!

There is a right way

Neal Stephenson has said that French culture possesses "an admirable stiff-neckedness that gave us the Jacobites, the metric system, the force de frappe, Airbus, and Arrêt signs in Quebec." Having spent several months in France now, I think that this observation goes too far. Hanging out in France is not like being penned up in some kind of sadistic etiquette school. People are perfectly willing to go with the flow, particularly in service of a reasonable objective. This is why waiters are so patient with my attempts at French, other than just being nice human beings: I have a credit card.

Why did French feel the need to coin a French word for e-mail, for instance? Were they just being stiff-necked? I thought maybe the latter, until I discovered that the word émail is already in use in French. It means "enamel." Hence the need for courriel.