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• Wednesday, January 14, 2009 03:32 AM

  Lingua my franca baby, till the juice runs down my legs

  Mona Tuesday, January 13, 2009 04:35 PM "To those posting in French"

  "Speaking in French, or any language that most do not understand, demonstrates the need of a weak persons's fragile ego to build itself up."

  Thanks for your contribution on this matter. I’m afraid that the fault is all mine. It was me that first mentioned the French writers Sartre and Camus and what they might have had to say about existentialism, torture and imprisonment and whether there might be some relevance there to the War on Terror and Gitmo. So being replied to in a language I barely understand I took as a salutary slap and a sad reminder that I have never in fact been able to read them in their original language.

  This lack I lay firmly at the doors of my non native speaking French teachers when I was at school many years ago. I could never understand why the French used “le” or “la” in front of nouns. If there was any rhyme or reason to do so either my teachers didn’t know or in spite of my continually asking them just couldn’t be arsed to explain.

  Given that, I decided quite defiantly that I couldn’t be arsed to learn the language of a nation whose anyway greatest contribution to rock & roll at that time comprised the “oeuvre” of Jonnie fucking Halliday.

  I mean I ask you, could you, back in the sixties, at a time when Jagger’s moll, Marianne Faithfull was quite delightfully being nicked by the drug squad whilst wearing nothing more than a fur coat and a Mars bar, be bothered to learn a language you couldn’t use to write a rock song in?

  It was only very much later that I came across the term “Le petite mort” (The small death) and learnt that it was the French term for those precious moments that follow an orgasm. Had the priest tutors at my Roman Catholic all boys school had the presence of mind to bring this term to my attention at a crucial stage of my adolescent development as they should have done I’m sure I’d have been all over the language like a fucking rash.

  But even here the same difficulty would have arisen. You see I’d always have thought that the moment we expel our last breath would be more a feminine event rather than a masculine one. And that therefore it should read “La petite mort” rather than “le”. But then, what the hell would I know? Come to think of it, what the hell would any of us know?

  As another French writer, Flaubert once wrote,

  “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, whilst all the while, we’d rather move the stars to pity.”

  —LondonLad Read LondonLad's other letters
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