No Trombones

I'm about to send back my automatic debit information for payment of an electric bill--ah yes, life in France isn't all café au lait and croissants--and when I lift the flap of the reply envelope provided, I'm confronted with the following admonitions:

Ne pas plier. Pas de trombone. Pas d'adhésif. Pas d'agrafe.  *

"Pas de trombone" ?!  Of course, as a little diagram illustrating each prohibition shows, a trombone is what the French call a paper clip, and the reason is suddenly obvious as I look at the picture. But what poetry in the prosaic! I am charmed all over again by the way another language can cast a new light on something mundane. Here's a metaphor in the midst of the everyday that the French probably don't even notice, just as we don't notice the metaphors that have become commonplace in English. It takes someone new to the language--a foreigner, a child--to hear them.

When my daughter was four, I showed her a lily of the valley and told her its name; she repeated it slowly and said, that's a lovely word--and I heard the phrase freshly again. More tragi-comically, when one of my sons was about five, he bumped the side of his head hard against something, and I said, "You're going to have a cauliflower ear." He went away, looking thoughtful; I don't remember just how long he suffered in silence. Eventually he whispered anxiously to his father, "Is a cauliflower really going to grow out of my ear?"

For the expert in-depth shedding of light on the mundane, there's Henry Petroski, whose 1994 book The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts--from Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers--Came to be as They are has a close-up paperclip on the cover. I haven't read it yet, nor his book dedicated entirely to another stationery item, the pencil; but I do know The Book on the Bookshelf, his wonderful exploration of the history of the book, from its earliest beginnings, including the evolution of the codex from the scroll (an interest of mine), to the growth of libraries.

Here in France it's easy to find les trombones, les agrafes, les papiers, les cahiers, les stylos, and every sort of stationery item you can imagine, because--at least in Lyon--stationery and art supply stores abound. Some are free-standing, others are enormous departments within bookshops. It's a stationery-lover's paradise; and the word for "stationery" is much prettier in French: papeterie.  And when I signed up for the Decitre bookshop carte de fidélité --almost every store has its loyalty card--I was given a coupon for 10% off all the papeterie. I can't wait to go and spend it! Decitre is a wonderful bookshop with two branches on opposite sides of Place Bellecour; one with many floors of books in French, the other with books and newspapers in various languages, especially English. And, of course, I go back and forth between the the two.


*for non French speakers: Do not fold; No adhesives; No staples. Re trombone, read on.

Word Hoard

Here's another internet wonder of which I was ignorant, and have now learnt about from a kind friend in England: I can access the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary with my Gloucestershire Libraries card! This is a most amazing thing.

Of course, I hastened to look up "guinea fowl" and found it's "a gallinaceous bird of the genus Numida." Early references include:  "1655 T.Moffett & C. Bennet Healths Improvem. x.84......certain cheqred Hens and Cocks out of New Guiny, spoted white and black like a Barbers apron; whose flesh is like to the flesh of Turkies."

And indeed, the pintade I had for dinner was turkey-like. But I can't help wondering if it's right to eat such a beautiful bird, spotted "like a barber's apron."  Did mid-seventeenth-century barbers wear spotted aprons the way chefs wear chequered trousers today? Or--now I see this is more likely--it's that a white apron becomes speckled as the hair cuttings fall on it.

On the online OED, a sidebar lists the words surrounding guinea-fowl alphabetically, almost as if it were a page in the "real" dictionary; and so I click on "guinea-cock," and go further back in time, to German writer Conrad Heresbach's husbandry guide, originally in Latin, translated in 1577 by Barnaby Goodge:  "I would fain learn the right ordring of their outlandish birds, called Ginny Cocks, and Turky Cocks...Before the yeere of our Lord 1530 they were not seene with us."

I'm not sure, as I haven't read the quotation in context--though I long to do so, as happens when you start this--what Heresbach means by wanting to "learn the right ordering" of the birds; taxonomically, perhaps? Instead, I imagine a flurry of speckled feathers and a furious cackling, and him standing helplessly in the farmyard trying to call them to order...

The intriguing-sounding Dyets Dry Dinner by H. Buttes, 1599,  says "The Ginny-cocke was first brought out of Numidia, into Italy.." Testimony to the bird's African origin, hence its genus name, Numida.


I must stop. And I promise I won't quote chunks of the OED in every post, though I might be tempted. This is meant to be about French words, after all! But it is wonderful to know I can open it at will, and read it more easily than with that wretched magnifying glass.

So would I be perfectly happy if the third edition (now in preparation) never appears in book form? No. That would be a great loss. Somewhere, if only in a library, one should be able to find all twenty or more volumes, in readable print, and with covers and spine and turnable paper pages. That is, if one can find a library; yesterday I walked down to central Lyon's huge, open place, Bellecour, and at the kiosk bought an English language newspaper, in which I read that many public libraries in Britain are to be closed.

C'est dommage.  And that's British understatement.

Birds of a feather

Goodness, I'm posting on consecutive days...you'll have spotted that I've carefully avoided promising a daily post; the discipline is something I admire and even aspire to, but then I hesitate to commit to it, and also perhaps I fear to overload the blogosphere...

However, I feel I should follow up on pintade, or guinea fowl, as I said I probably would. A friend of a friend mentioned that to find out more about a French word, one can go on google.fr and ask for a définition. This produces definitions from several different dictionaries. (I expect you are now mentally saying "no duh," but I'm still quite ignorant about many internet wonders). I did this for pintade and was gratified to learn my hunch was correct: the French word for guinea fowl does have a connection with the concept of paint, via Portuguese or Spanish pintar, to paint, and pintado, painted. And of course the bird does look as if someone took a paintbrush to it, as a quick google search for its photo will reveal.

A quick google search: yes, that is how we do everything now. And I can't help but wonder if it means that my kind of musing, questioning exploration of words is too old-fashioned for this universe of fast answers.

Among the French definitions of pintade I also found a wonderful note from Le Dictionnaire de L'académie française, saying that figuratively and familiarly, il se dit d'une Femme sotte et vaniteuse.  I don't know if this use of it to mean a foolish and vain woman is still current--more fluent French speakers will have to tell me that; but it reminds me of a wonderful Italian figurative expression taken from a different bird: pavoneggiarsi, to peacock oneself. (Peacock is pavone in Italian.) This is used more of men than of women, I believe (after all it's the peacock not the peahen that is the spectacular bird), and suggests overt self-display in the evening passegiata up and down the corso.


I sense an interesting potential for cultural analysis of whether preening self-display is more common in French women than French men, and, conversely, more a tendency of Italian men than Italian women!
In both countries, as the kind of person who can be bothered to read this blog will know already, appearances are supremely important. And as I have an appointment at the bank in forty-five minutes, I must go and prepare myself for the outside world. I will try and appear reasonably smart, but any such attempt will be sadly offset by my bleary eyes and red nose, as I'm suffering from a heavy cold.

Grumpy as this makes one feel, I can still rejoice at being here, especially as the weather is lovely again today, with a blue sky and sunshine. So I will sally forth--not a pintade, I hope, and I certainly won't pavoneggiarmi; if I could choose the bird I would like to be, it would be an English robin, perhaps? A female blackbird? Or perhaps I am more--in this blog at least--a magpie, stealing bright glistening things from here and there, and shoving them any old how into my nest, where they gleam incoherently among the prosaic twigs.

Zed (or Zee)

Well, the reason I don't have have my beloved Oxford English Dictionary with me, or indeed most of my books, is simple: I just could not bring many of them here with me. And I cannot begin to explain how bereft this loss of my library--or what's left of it, since our recent downsizing--makes me feel.

But actually, my OED is less and useful to me as time goes on. I have the two-volume edition, in which the print is miniscule, so a magnifying glass was supplied; but even with the glass, it is too hard for me to read now.

I think I will take the extravagant plunge and buy the CD format. There is absolutely no substitute for the OED, as word mavens know; it's a monument to the richness of the English language and gives examples of a word's usage from the earliest days. Rumour has it that the next edition will probably not appear in traditional book form at all.  The current full-size edition takes up twenty volumes, and few people have money to buy it or space to store it....but still, it's a shame if this most wonderful of books will not be a book any more.

Here in Lyon it is a beautiful morning. A luminous blue sky and sunshine...the temperatures were spring-like yesterday and forecast to be mild again today. We can see a wide swath of sky because our apartment is on the fifth floor, almost at roof-top level. We can also see that the roof and dormer windows of a nearby building are being repaired, and a banner draped over the scaffolding proclaims that the construction company does charpente-couverture-zinguerie: carpentry, "covering"--roofing, I assume--and the intriguing-sounding zinguerie.


Zinguerie makes me think of gypsies, because zingara is gypsy in Italian--a word conjuring the swirl of long skirts and the throbbing violin. The reality of the effect on Italian and other European cities of the people known as "gypsies"--colourfully dressed street beggars and, sometimes, pickpockets--is less romantic. Although they are popularly called gypsies, I'm not sure they are really Romany, or Roma. I ought to know, because I've read Isabel Fonseca's fascinating book about gypsies, Bury Me Standing; but, alas, as with so much I read, I have retained little. One snippet I do remember is that, in the gypsy world, cats are filthy, because, when they clean themselves with their tongues, they take all their dirt inside their bodies.

However, it's unlikely this roofing company has anything to do with gypsies; so, to the French-English dictionary (Le Robert & Collins): ah. Zinguer: to coat with zinc. Zingeur: zinc worker. So zinguerie, though not in the dictionary, must be "zinc work." A plombier zingeur is a plumber and zinc worker. I'm not really sure what the metal zinc is or does (although I know it's thought to help the immune system these days) nor why this construction company would mention zinc work as a part of its repertoire, unless by extension zinguerie has come to mean metalwork more generally. More prosaic than it sounds, and if you knew this all along, you're laughing.

Never mind; I enjoyed my foray into the z --zed as we Brits say, zee in American--section of the French dictionary, with its other exotic-sounding words like zizanie, which means ill-feeling, and zibeline, sable. But perhaps z doesn't sound exotic to the French: there's also zozo, nitwit or ninny, or guy or bloke, (I don't think the dictionary is saying these are all the same thing!), not to mention zizi, the equivalent of the English childhood word "willy" for a certain body part. Funnily enough, I knew zizi already, from the subtitles of the wonderful movie we saw yesterday,The King's Speech.

All Fowled Up

A few days ago, we went out to dinner, and on the menu (menus are frequent sources of puzzlement) was something called pintade; all I could glean from the description of the dish was that it would be cooked in some kind of African fashion. Was pintade meat, fish or fowl? The waiter, when I asked, said it was volaille. Fowl, then. When the dish came it was indeed some sort of poultry; very like chicken, but its bits seemed worryingly small. Not quite sparrow-small, though; I didn’t think it wasn’t a question of tiny songbirds netted during migration or anything awful like that—I fervently hoped not, since I devoured it with enjoyment.

The following day, at the market along the river bank, there was a stall with rotisserie chicken, poulet, (smelling irresistible), and also, according to the list of wares, pintade. I didn’t see the mystery bird, as I was jostled away to the cheese counter, where I became absorbed in the choice between brillat savarin and gouda and gorgonzola (bought a bit of each), so I was still none the wiser.

The rest of Sunday we were busy eating the roasted chicken and potatoes, and visiting the Musée de L’Imprimerie where, in vaulted sixteenth-century rooms, we saw early printing presses and precious incunabulae, plus a temporary exhibition of wonderful London Transport posters, courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art. (This global world--posters of my native England, in a historic French building, via an American university).

So now, today, finally to the dictionary: and pintade is “guinea-fowl.” Aren't they those pretty little hens with speckledy feathers? And why do we say “guinea-fowl”--did they originally come from Guinea? And what is the origin of the French word, which has no inkling of Guinea about it?  Is it related to peint and the painted look of the bird’s polka-dots?

And now I see that for this enterprise I will need to acquire another copy—a computer version?—of the Oxford English Dictionary, without which one cannot discuss words properly at all….or at least English words. And also an etymological dictionary for the French lexicon. Well, one step at a time…

Next: Why I don’t have my dear OED with me, or indeed, most of my books. 

Plus: can I write anything, even a little blog, without my books around me? 

And, perhaps, the answers to those questions about guinea-fowl.