Flirting With French (9 page)

“Your brain is saturated,” she says. “There’s no more room.”

“Well, I have to make some room.” This conversation is starting to sound eerily familiar. The connection comes to me. “Sherlock Holmes.”

“Huh?”

“In the very first Sherlock Holmes story, ‘A Study in Scarlet,’ Watson is astounded to learn that Holmes is unaware of Copernicus’s discovery three hundred years earlier that the earth revolves around the sun. And Holmes says something like, ‘What the deuce is it to me whether the earth revolves around the sun or the other way around? The mind is like an attic, with a finite amount of space, and a fool fills it up with every piece of junk he comes across, so it soon gets filled up and he can’t uncover the important stuff that’s up there. But a wise man only brings in the materials and tools that are of the most use to him.’ ” (I was a Sherlock Holmes geek as a child.)

Is my brain maxed out? Have I really reached the point of French in, French out? Or do I just need a furniture arranger, an interior decorator for my attic-brain? As it turns out, one is about to show up.

TH
E HISTORY
OF MEMORY
is generally dated to the legendary story related by Cicero about a tragic incident that occurred back in the fifth century BC. The Greek poet Simonides of Ceos was attending a banquet, the story goes, and had just stepped outside to have a smoke or take a phone call or something, when the palace collapsed, killing everyone inside, leaving the corpses so crushed under tons of stone that identification of the victims was impossible. One could not even say for sure who was inside. Families rushed to Simonides, asking if their loved ones were among the victims.

“How the hell should I know?” he might’ve said (except that the concept of hell was still a few centuries off ), for he certainly hadn’t taken attendance or even paid much attention. Yet, in the desperation of the moment, Simonides did a creative and unique thing. He closed his eyes and rebuilt the palace in his head, replaying his entrance and exit through the hall,
visualizing
the scene—“Ah, I nodded hello to Pseudolus on the way in, and remember wondering, how did he get a date with that cute Philia”—and re-creating in his mind’s eye the seating arrangements. In this manner he was able to recall a remarkable number of those in attendance.

This event is the origin of the memorization technique known today, with a nod to Simonides, as the memory palace, a familiar room (or village or route) in which you strategically place the items you are memorizing. The Romans called it the method of loci (
loci
being Latin for “places”), and you may also hear it referred to as the peg system, for in one variant you hang the objects you are trying to remember on pegs in a familiar place.

The memory palace seems to be most effective when, instead of imaging the mundane object you are trying to remember, you substitute something related but more outrageous that will recall the object. Joshua Foer, who used the system to become the United States memory champion, gives the example of having to memorize a long shopping list that includes a snorkel and cottage cheese. He constructs his palace in his home, but instead of placing the snorkel on, say, the kitchen counter, he visualizes a man snorkeling in his kitchen sink, a much more bizarre—and therefore memorable—image. For the cottage cheese, he summons up Claudia Schiffer swimming in a vat of cottage cheese.

Memory techniques were in vogue in ancient times, before the advent of the written word, when possessing a sound memory was crucial, not only for shopping lists, but for
everything.
There is no question that the ancients had better memories than we do today. Without their extraordinary memories we’d have no
Iliad
or
Odyssey,
then or now. When the first writing systems appeared, there was much hand-wringing over what some saw as the inevitable demise of memory—a debate reawakened in the Internet age, when once again we are worrying about whether memory will become a sort of vestigial organ. After all, why memorize something when you can google it from your smartphone?

As writing reached the masses, the teaching of formal memory techniques fell out of fashion, but after hearing an interview with Foer, I wonder whether using the memory palace could help me with my French. Initially I’d thought not, because the operative word here is
learning.
That is, I am learning a language, not memorizing a few dozen handy phrases (
Où sont les toilettes
?
) of the kind often supplied in guidebooks.

Well, a little research reveals that some linguists have indeed been promoting (and, naturally, others deriding) a mnemonic approach to learning foreign vocabulary for at least the past thirty years. Called the keyword method, this technique is a simple two-step process: Step one, take the foreign word and think of an English word (the keyword) that sounds like the foreign word. Step two, form an image in your mind that links the foreign and English words. For example, say you are trying to memorize the French word for “bread,”
pain
(pronounced something like “pah”). This is close to “pan.” So visualize a pan. Now picture that pan coming out of the oven filled with bread, and concentrate on that image for a few seconds. Bake it into your brain. Now, the next time you see the French word
pain,
you should be able to conjure up this picture, and say, “Aha, bread!”

How is this any better than simply memorizing that
pain
means “bread”? For the same reason that Simonides’s memory palace technique works: the mind is remarkably adept at remembering images, but not so good at retaining words. In fact, the average adult can remember a list of only seven items (my own limit, as we have seen, is closer to three). It makes sense, evolutionarily speaking, that humans are better at remembering images than they are at remembering words, since we acquired sight way, way before we developed speech, not to mention writing. For that reason, various forms of visualization constitute the primary technique employed by all contemporary memory experts. The most common technique for memorizing the order of a deck of playing cards (a classic memory competition event) is to substitute a vivid image for each of the fifty-two cards in a deck.

Simple enough. Some months earlier I’d bought, and tried to memorize, an English-French children’s dictionary of a thousand simple words. I never got past
C
. I retrieve the book and start again, this time using the mnemonic keyword technique. For
se
plaindre
(to complain), I picture a bunch of talking
plantains
complaining about me every time I walk by. Funny. One word that has evaded me for weeks is
autoriser,
a verb meaning “to give permission.” I close my eyes and picture myself in my mechanic’s garage asking him for permission to put my car on his lift—his
auto riser
. Bingo. Ten minutes later, I test myself with a handful of new words, and pass. But as I add words, I start forgetting earlier words. It seems there is, as Anne (and Sherlock) had surmised, only so much room in there. My attic-brain is overfilled, bursting at the rafters.

To my dismay, though, two objects that seem to have taken up permanent residence—and precious room—in the attic are the snorkeler in my kitchen sink and poor Claudia Schiffer, still stuck in that vat of cottage cheese. I mean, I just can’t get these images, which I’d had no intention of memorizing, out of my head. At the same time, I’ve forgotten the past tense of “to have.” Clearly, Claudia is trying to tell me something. There
must
be a way to use the memory palace with French. I return to my English-French children’s dictionary, opening it at the bookmarked letter
C,
and, covering the French translation, look at the word “coat.” Damn, I had that word in seventh grade, again in high school, while prepping for French trips, and once again just a few months ago, not to mention the last time I was on this very dictionary page. But I still haven’t learned it.

Okay, I’m going to build a memory palace and stick a coat in it. But where? I move my hand to reveal the translation:
manteau.
Borrowing from the keyword method of association, I first connect it to
mantel
. Then, constructing a memory palace, I place the coat on the fireplace mantel in my living room.
Mantel
/
manteau.
Good match, but a coat on a mantel is not very memorable. So let’s put a man inside the coat and give him a hat, a
chapeau
. Ah, he just became a British
chap.

Any well-dressed British chap up on a mantel needs an umbrella, that wonderful French word
parapluie,
which can double as a
para
chute if he needs to jump off. His wife, an unfortunate, homeless
bag
lady, wears a diamond
bague
on her finger. This couple’s daughter is
jump
ing rope in her skirt (
jupe
),
impermeable
to the rain that’s falling onto her yellow
imperméable.
As kids are wont to do, she is
pull
ing constantly at the sleeve of her sweater (
pull
).

But what is this strange crew doing in my living room? Sadly, it’s a wake for the son, a ten-year-old kid, laid out in a
casket
wearing a baseball cap (
casquette
) and sneakers (
baskets
) under a
basket
ball hoop. I run through the scene with this odd family, whom I’m starting to enjoy, a few times in my head, jot down some notes, and test myself an hour later. Still there. The next day, the next
week,
still there. Thus it seems that while the keyword method itself doesn’t work and the memory palace doesn’t even really apply (it’s usually employed to memorize mere lists of items), combining the two methods—assigning a keyword and placing that object in a palace—clicks! Of course, a week is one thing, but the big question remains: Will the French Addams family still be jumping rope in my living room during a wake in the rain next month, or next year, or will they have gotten bored and left? My guess is that to keep them there, I’ll have to visit often.

Well, how many words can one memorize with this method? For starters, how about I try the thousand words in my children’s English-French dictionary? Returning to the letter
A,
I divide the words that I don’t know into themed rooms. The first room I build is an action room, for verbs. Nothing says “action” like a gym, so for this room I choose my former health club. As I enter, I see a strongman bench-
press
ing in a hurry (
être press
é
), while another athlete fills up (
remplir
) a water bottle to
reple
n
ish his thirst, and so on. The next day, I’ll revisit the gym, along with what has turned out to be my clothing-themed room (the Addams family), and begin the construction of my adjective room (the reading room of the New York Public Library), then a weather and outdoors room (the beach—it doesn’t have to be a real room), and more.

When I need to retrieve a word, I simply go to the appropriate room and conjure up the right character. I review these lists nightly, and at some point I realize I’ve stopped using the keyword. I don’t need to see the boy lying in a casket to recall the
casquette
on his head anymore, but the association is there if I need it.

When I’ve built and populated all my rooms, I give myself a test, running through the entire thousand-word dictionary from
A
to
Z.
My score: 98.5 percent. In ten days, not ten weeks or ten months, I’ve memorized virtually the entire
Mon premier Bescherelle anglai
s
!

STILL UNDECIDED ABOUT SURGERY,
I worry that a few hours of anesthesia could sweep clean not only my carefully constructed memory palace rooms but some far more critical rooms—say, the ones in which I have my kids’ names and where I live. And then there’s that small percentage of complications, which I’ve magnified with my plane analogy. Still, if there’s a good chance that a single procedure could fix my heart, could get that balky left atrium beating regularly again, why would I pass that up? “I’m only fifty-seven,” I tell Anne.

“Fifty-eight.”

During what verb conjugation did that happen? “Fifty-eight. Do I really want to spend the rest of my life running on three cylinders?”

Anne thinks for a moment, and the physician in her replies, “Actually, it’s two.” Both atria are fibrillating.

The French have a saying:
Le
cœur qui soupire n’a pas ce qu’il désire
. The heart that sighs does not have what it desires. In the morning I book a seat on Chinitz’s plane, which doesn’t depart for another few weeks. And distract myself by trying to focus on French.

Et Tu, Brute?

The tu is generally used to insult a fellow automobilist and always used when talking to oneself or to death.

—
International Herald Tribune,
February 19, 2000

“Yes, Bill, you can
tutoyer
.”

Woo-hoo! My twenty-something glam-rocker part-time-model French pen pal, Sylvie, has given me the green light to use the familiar
tu
form with her. I feel
très français.

Following protocol, or my understanding of protocol, I had first formally asked permission to use the familiar
tu,
and trust me, I agonized over the timing of this a good deal, because, well, a negative answer (“I think it’s a little premature for that, Bill”) would’ve been nothing short of humiliating. So I exhaled in relief when I received her reply, although something a little more positive, say, “Of course!” or “By all means—I thought you’d never ask!” would’ve been preferable to an answer that could just as easily be read as “[Sigh] If you must.”

Even most non-Francophones know that the French use two pronouns for addressing a second person. That is, there are two ways to say “you”: the formal (or polite)
vous
and the familiar
tu.
When to use which can be baffling to a foreigner, although to be fair to the French, they didn’t make this business up. Blame the Latin that Julius Caesar brought to Gaul and that formed the basis of modern French. Thus it should come as no surprise that variations of
tu
and
vous
are also found in the other Romance languages, such as Italian, Spanish, and Romanian. Now, I don’t know how it’s handled in, say, Romania, or even other francophone countries, but in France the usage of
vous
and
tu
is less about grammar than about social position and how one views oneself and one’s place in the world.

When I say that Caesar brought the formal
vous
to France, that’s not strictly true. In the Latin of Caesar’s day, everyone from your emperor to your dog was just
tu
. The Latin
vos
was strictly reserved for the plural (“you all”). The use of
vos
(which would become the French
vous
) to refer to a single person didn’t appear until the fourth century, and came about almost by accident. Its first use was to refer only to the dual Roman emperors, both of them, because by then the empire had split into an eastern empire ruled from Constantinople and a western empire overseen from Rome. Politically, however, the two emperors ruled with one joint voice, and to hammer home the point they began to refer to themselves as
nos,
or “we.” (This may be the origin of the royal “we” that today one tends to associate with English queens.)

Once the inevitable confusion that must have resulted was cleared up—I have this image of the western emperor sitting alone on his throne telling a puzzled page, “We’d like some coffee,” and the page returning with two cups and being called an idiot—the emperors’ people had to deal with a touchy issue of protocol: how to address someone who refers to himself as “we.” They wound up deciding that if the emperor was going to refer to himself in the plural, they’d damn well better address him likewise, so they began to address each individual emperor in the plural,
vos.

So far, so good. But the next thing you knew, the pope was demanding parity (there is written evidence of Gregory I referring to himself in the plural in the late sixth century), and this
vos
thing started to mean something other than a double-headed emperor; it had become an honorific title bestowing status. Kings started insisting on being addressed as
vos,
then nobles, and then not-so-nobles, as the custom filtered, top-down, through the social strata of Europe, until it reached the point where French peasants had their children calling them
vous.
Naturally, people who expected to be addressed as
vous
reciprocally addressed that person as
tu.
This is what linguists call the power semantic: the use of
tu
and
vous
to convey superior (or concede inferior) power or status.

Well, what about people of the same social stratum? What were they to call one another? Back in the good old days, everyone was just
tu,
but now with all these power games going on, a new set of rules was needed. The upper crust considered themselves the elite and referred to one another as
vous,
even husbands and wives. Peers of the lower classes, meanwhile, stuck with
tu,
often as a point of pride, a show of solidarity, a syntactic sneer at the upper classes. For that reason, the reciprocal usage of
tu
or
vous
among people of similar classes is called the solidarity semantic.

The French nearly managed to do away with all this during the French Revolution, with the Committee for Public Safety condemning the usage of
vous
as a feudal vestige. Robespierre even addressed the president of the Assembly as
tu,
an act that could’ve bought you a ticket to the guillotine just a few months earlier. But cooler heads—or rather, warmer heads, those still attached to bodies—prevailed, and as republican ideals went out the window in the Restoration that followed,
vous
was restored along with the Crown.

A scenario similar to the events of 1789 played out during the May 1968 student uprisings, when protestors, like the
sans-culottes
of two centuries earlier, threw off the shackles of the oppressive
vous,
although as they have aged and entered the workplace and mainstream society, many have lost their
tutoyer
principles along with their long hair. Meanwhile, although we no longer address waiters as
tu
and expect them to call us
vous,
it is still common to have such a relationship with your boss at work or your teacher in school. In the 2008 French movie
Th
e Class,
a student is dragged to the principal’s office for having committed the offence of using
tu
with a teacher.

The solidarity semantic is going strong as well. If anything, the lines between
vous
and
tu
have blurred and the unwritten rules have become more inscrutable. Take, for example, my dilemma with Sylvie: At what point does someone become enough of an intimate to be called
tu
? And for that matter, who makes the first move? Not to worry: the French have developed an entire formal protocol for how it’s done, even going so far as to invent a verb (
tutoyer
) that means “to address each other with the
tu
form.”

Here’s how it works: When you first meet someone, you generally address each other as
vous,
unless your relationship comes under one of the three dozen or so overriding rules (adult/child, etc.). You and your new acquaintance might see each other again and continue chatting, even have a coffee together. And at some point, when it feels right, one of you will say to the other some variation of
On se tutoie?
meaning, “Shall we use the
tu
form with each other?” And with any luck the other will agree.

Gulp. To me, this little mating dance holds all the risks and none of the rewards of asking a girl to the senior prom, a prospect I found so terrifying that I confess I never actually got around to it. Indeed, I felt my gut tightening when I asked Sylvie “
On se tutoie?
” via e-mail. What gave me the courage to try was Sylvie’s use of the intimate greeting, “
Coucou,
Bill!” in her recent notes.

Coucou?
When I told her in my response that my dictionary defined it as a bird or a clock, she explained, “It is like the American word ‘hi,’ it’s very familiar and mostly used for friends and family :)” Okay, I figured, I’ve made it to
tutoyer-
ville, especially with that smiley she tacked on (which raises a whole other set of questions about the relationship of emoticons and the formal second person, which I am not prepared to go into here, or anywhere, or ever), and the time seemed right to, well, propose.

Now, had I been more familiar with these protocols, I would’ve known that because I’m old enough to be Sylvie’s father, I should’ve used the
tu
form with her from the get-go. She, on the other hand (had she been writing in French, not English), would properly have called me
vous,
which would have been more than a little weird, a reminder in every sentence that “you’re old enough to be my father,” so I in turn would have invited her to
tutoyer
. This is ignoring the fact, of course, that the Internet, informal by nature, must have its own set of rules.
Oy vey!

IT’S DATE NIGHT IN
the Alexander household, meaning a French dinner that includes my to-die-for
pommes
Anna
*
(the only dish I know of that’s named after a prostitute—you can look it up), followed by a well-reviewed French movie I’ve picked out, in turn followed, with any luck, by a little French kissing.

We’ll have to do our smooching in English because, remarkably, the French do not have a term for “French kissing.” I mean, nothing at all! Therefore the 2014
Petit Robert
dictionary, perhaps concerned about the impact this might be having on the already low French birthrate, has just proposed one—a very odd concept for Americans, who kind of just wait for a new word to arrive naturally—coming up with the verb
galocher,
which is derived from the word for an ice-skating boot, the idea apparently being that a French kiss is kind of sliding around on the ice, but with your lips and tongue. Okay. You can like it or hate it, but as we know,
Petit Robert
is not the final arbiter. What I wouldn’t give to be in the room when the Académie française takes this up!

Back at date night, we were up to the French movie part. It’s been my observation that about 90 percent of French films fall roughly into one of just two plotlines. The first is of the man-loves-woman-loves-another-man-loves-another-woman variety, with luscious scenery and exquisitely worn scarves.

The second category consists of movies that leave you despairing about the futility of existence, the folly of love, and how the hell you could have chosen this movie for date night! Tonight’s feature,
Les herbes folles
(
Wild Grass
), by the acclaimed director Alain Resnais, belongs, regrettably, to this group. Everyone ends up dead in the end, including, I suspect, no small number of viewers who watched it all the way through, but it isn’t a total loss because of a didactic moment that crystallizes for me just how powerful, and meaningful, this
tu
business is.

Georges, who is about sixty, is opening a bottle of champagne, surrounded by his wife, daughter, and son-in-law, Jean-Mi, who has apparently been in the family for some time, long enough to have given Georges two grandchildren. As everyone sips champagne, and the laughter and good times roll, Jean-Mi figures the moment is right for the
tutoyer
gambit.

JEAN-MI:
We could use
tu
now.

GEORGES:
I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. Do you mind?

JEAN-MI:
No, no, I was just asking.

GEORGES:
Use
tu
to say what? We’re fine like this, aren’t we?

At which point I turn to Anne and say, “Wow, now
that’s
using the power semantic!”

She says, “How much longer do we have to watch this?”

“But this is amazing! They’re having a whole discussion on
tutoye
r
! We have
nothing
like this in America!”

“No, sir, we don’t.”

“Cute.”

But outside the military and the South, even “sir,” which, of course, isn’t quite the same thing, has become rare. However, I did get an intriguing lesson in how things might have turned out had American English retained a version of
vous/tu
when during my first hospital stay I read, in French (with the help of a dictionary and a translation), the 1946 Jean-Paul Sartre play
Th
e Respectful Prostitute,
which takes place in America’s Deep South. The play opens with a knock at the door and a man addressing a prostitute with
vous,
while she returns a
tu.
This confused me greatly. Who would be addressing a hooker in the formal, while receiving the familiar?

A
Noir,
or a black man, that’s who. (As it happens, in a few decades Mexicans will appear on the scene and an American
Noir
will have someone to call
tu.
) By the way, you might expect that a prostitute, on the (almost) lowest rung of society’s ladder, would use
vous
to address the man who appears later in the scene, her distinguished and wealthy client, but in fact they address each other as
tu
. There’s a saying in Spanish that “prostitutes are women who smoke and treat you with
tú.
” It makes sense, if you think about what you’re really paying for.

By the way,
tu
is not forever. Should the need arise to go back to
vous—
say, if you catch your best friend in bed with your wife—the French, bless ’em, who didn’t have a word for “French kiss” until ten minutes ago, do have a word you can use here:
vouvoyer
.

WHAT MAKES THIS ALL
so difficult is that there are no hard-and-fast rules. In a piece published in the
International Herald Tribune,
the English-language newspaper based in Paris, Mary Blume wrote that foreigners “cannot hope to master the intricacies of the
tu
and
vous
forms of address, because the French can’t either.” Still, I’ve been able to glean some rules, which I’ve put into a simple flowchart (see next page) that I recommend you take with you on your next trip to France.

SO HOW DID WE
English speakers manage to avoid this curse? After all, English is the offspring of Old French and German, another language that has formal and familiar terms of address (
Sie
and
du,
respectively). In fact, for a while English did have both forms, but unlike gender, which vanished entirely, vestiges of the formal and familiar are still found today, mainly in church, where “thou” is frequently used in prayer, but not, as you might think, as a formal, respectful way of addressing God. Quite the opposite: “thou” is the early modern English equivalent of
tu;
it is “ye” that corresponds to
vous.
(Speaking of God, in the French translation of the Bible, everyone just calls everyone else
tu.
Apparently, French Jesus does not expect his disciples to
vouvoyer
him, even as they refer to him as “Master.”)