The ear in your brain (English tips for French learners)

If you have ever been to an international conference, you probably couldn't have helped noticing how much the grip on English of a speaker depends on the country where s/he comes from. Folks from the Netherlands and Sweden would usually give a very decent performance. You would recognize French speakers among all by their accent, obviously; while the worst of them all are arguably the Japanese.

One explanation I have heard is that, after a while, you somehow become 'deaf' to the sounds that your mother language misses. The example I have most frequently come across is the Japanese that supposedly cannot differenciate between the 'r' and 'l' sounds.

According to my personnal experience, this does not make sense at all. Ok, I cannot pretend to clearly distinguish between the three (1, 2, 3) different ways of saying the word 'donkey'. But most of the time, when I am presenting two words, I can spot the difference, even how subtle it might be.

It seems to me the problem is not really that I cannot hear features that my own language does not have, but that I don't pay attention.

It's best illustrated with Chinese. Chinese has tones, which means that syllables are only part of the story; if you voice stays steady or falls sharply while you pronounce the syllable ma, you are either saying 媽 (mother) or 罵 (to insult), which obviously you don't want to mix if you still care about some potentially valuable inheritance. Now, everybody would agree that the difference between a steady and a falling tone can be heard by anybody; and yet, paying attention to this damn tones is one of the most difficult things to the students in Chinese.

I guess what I am trying to say is that, no matter how difficult it is to pay attention and to mimic new features of a foreign language, it is never, ever, impossible to. Your ear is not deaf to these sounds -- your brain is just too lazy to process them. Good news: the brain can be taught better.

One of the main difficulty when learning English is how to pronounce things. It has always striken me how English is so far away from all other European languages in that respect. German? You have to know how to pronounce those 'ch', and to make your p's and your t's stronger, and that's pretty much it. Spanish? The rolling r's are actually quite easy to master, as well as those funny z's and gutural j's. Italian? You get the weird gl's right and you're all set.

English? Well, forget about the alphabet. Actually, I've always thought that knowing how to read and write has been the main reason why learning how to pronounce English right took me so long. The relationship of English to writting is pathetic, if not pathological, and you just have to have a glance at the famous poem entitled 'This phonetic labyrinth' to have a pretty good understanding of how dramatic the situation is. (Note that this poem was written by a foreigner living in the UK. Quite a few of the spelling and pronouciation curiosities listed in this poem relates to British English. American English, thankfully, is considerably simpler and more consistent).

As for me, the first sparkle was made by one of my English teachers, who decided to lecture us about the phonetic writting of words. Of very, very basic words we thought we knew -- but we didn't, because again we didn't pay attention, every time we heard them, to the difference between what we thought those words are pronounced, and how they actually are. And this excellent teacher had shocking news indeed. He asked us to open our dictionaries and look at the pronounciation of this tiny, innocent, familiar word: of.

I coudn't believe my eyes.

The official pronounciation of of, in my dictionary and in all of my classmates was not 'OF', but 'UH-V'.

From this very moment, I suddenly realized the extent of all I have missed by sticking to the word spelling and my mental interpretation thereof. It's not that I couldn't make the distinction between 'of' and 'uh-v' -- it's just that I wasn't aware that I should in the first place. I just had to unlock the ear in my brain, to let loose any logic between writting and pronounciation, and let me relearn English. I also realized that this i that you find, say, in bit, is actually very easy to mimic if you think of it as a sound midway to the French i and é. (Give a bét of a try, you'll be surprised!).

From this very moment, I was also angry at all those useless English teachers I have had so far.

Thank you, dear English teacher -- you are one of the very few good English teachers France can be proud uh-v. Too bad I met you when I was already 20.

Having an accent; being fluent

I have this Russian colleague of mine who has been living in the UK and then in the US for the last past 6 years. No need to say that by now, she is quite fluent in English, and doesn't have a problem neither to understand nor, more importantly, to express herself. But she has this one hang-up: she speaks with an accent.

What's the big deal. Even France, which is not especially a large country, has a fair share of regional accents (e.g. Paris, Lille, Toulouse, Strasbourg) -- and I am not even talking about other French-speaking countries or regions, where accents are even stronger for us. Now, when we talk about English at large, does it make any sense to try to speak English without an accent? Who speaks English without an accent? English? Irish? Americans? Indians? (More than one billion of them --if size matters, they ought to be the standard). And then again, where in the US: New-York? Boston? Austin?

But that does not matter to her. She does not have the accent of any of these native-speakers, so this ought to mean that she is not fluent. And that's how she spends her days asking people around her to correct her pronounciation and to repeat words endlessly until she thinks she got it right.

While chatting with her, though, I learned that even though Russia is so large, people speak the same Russian with the same accent from Saint Petersburg to Vladivostok. They do not even have Russian dialects, whereas tiny France is packed with local languages like breton, provençal, basque, alsacien, corse... Could that explain her monotheist attitude towards what a language should be?

Some people didn't get the picture yet, and still tease her sometimes because of some mispronounciation. The latest one was a 'they want more presence' that apparently sounded like a 'they want more prisons'. That obviously did not improve her hang-up; she shamefully asked the guy to repeat and correct her, as she has done since I know her. Just to make a point, to both of them, I ask her to be cautious: the other guy being Indian, I warned her about getting the Indian accent, which certainly would sound much weirder, coming from a Russian, than her pure and fully functional Russian accent. For different reasons, none of them laughed, though.

I understand her, somehow. During my first internship abroad in the UK a while back, I was trying hard to get rid as much as I could of my French accent. But although I could distinctly perceive what made my French accent -- no pronounciation of h's, weak p's and t's, i's pronounced like ee's -- London was not the best place to understand what would make me sound really British, because there is no such thing. You have to choose your side: cockney, or Eton, or whatever.

What really changed my mindset, though, is when I met that girl that found my French accent 'charming'.

Charming, eh? Well, as long as you can understand me, and even if from time to time you will have to ask me whether I meant to share presence or prisons with you, that will do it for me.

Knowledge is frustration

According to one theory, a language tends to reflect the concerns of the people who use it through the diversity of its vocabulary. A famous example, that I am sure you have heard of because my readers are all so cool and clever, is the Eskimo language, which over the centuries, and given the icy environment the native speakers live in, has gathered more than a hundred words for snow and all the subtle variations in texture, color and taste these people came to recognize in it (for example, a large patch of yellow, melting, salty snow at the base of your igloo is called the Husky-pack-gonna-get-shit snow). Believe me, don't play a game of 'Spot the difference' with them if plain white pictures are involved.

Well, if that theory is true, how can you still believe that French people are romantic and Paris is the city of love? French has no word for 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend'. French has no word for 'date'. French has not word for 'spooning'. French has no word for 'santorum', but well, so did English only a year ago.

Thankfully, this theory is complete bullshit, including the Eskimo language hoax, but I am sure you knew that because my readers are so cool and clever (at least, you can show off to the few other billions that do not read this blog). Hey, after all, for all I know, Americans have only one word for SUV. More relevant is the frequency at which words are used. I have heard 'I' and 'dollar' are the most frequent words in English when people talk -- but interestingly, when they google, the word 'sex' comes first. My two-penny explanation: people talk about what they know, they look for what they don't.

Ok, so the lousy theory is out, but the frustration remains. The lack of a French word for 'boy-/girlfriend' is actually a continuous source of confusion and headaches, because since 15 years or so, people are simply using copin(e) ('friend') instead (before that, we were using petit(e) ami(e), 'little intimate friend' -- cute and much less ambiguous). Yes, it's absurd. Just imagine what mental processes parents have to go through everytime their kids mention that their 'friend will come and stay overnight'. In France, be sure to always invite more than two friends at the same time, the plural will disambiguate the situation -- mostly (we are still in France, remember?).

Studying foreign languages is frustrating at times, because you retrospectivelly realize all the features your mother language is missing. There are plenty of English words, idioms or expressions that I am now used to, and that I struggle to translate when I have to switch back to French, either because their French counterparts don't exist, I never knew them, or I simply forgot. Like 'toddler', 'townhouse', or 'averaging out' -- random examples taken from the recent past. Living here in the US for several years now, and although my English is far from perfect as you can notice, there are times when I speak French, I just cannot come with the French translation of what I have in mind. And to the fellow French I am speaking with, it is just weird that what comes to my mind is in English in the first place. Some even think I am an arrogant, showing-off jerk , when I stumble and pitifully ask, "Oh, how do you say that in French? I forgot."

It's even weirder, though, when that's Americans that do not understand why sometimes French comes out first. Today at lunch, a guy asked me if courses I had at the university back in France were taught in English. I told him, no, they were in French (if they always should is another topic). He looked surprised, and told me, 'Oh, really? But what about the books? Do they translate them as well?'

Well, I have news: French people can write books, too.

Pardon my French

The other day, I was chatting with American friends. Someone was speaking about her boss, and at some point, as you can imagine, a bad word materialized in the middle of the conversation. For the record, it was 'bitch'.

And what came immediatly after this? Well, yes, you are right, and the title probably helped: "Pardon my French".

But then, some folks realized I was French, and started apologizing. They thought this was very offensive to associate French with bad words, and some even went as far as expressing their disapproval for that expression.

That was one of these moments when I am left dizzy thinking of the extent of the gap between our cultures.

The fact is that French does have a lot of slang, and that we are proud of it. It seems to me that we are one of the most active language on that front, and one hint is the rate at which French slang becomes obsolete. If you go to France, don't throw in some of the French slang words you know if you learned them some 20 years ago, because you will sparkle some heavy laughter and get severly taunted in the current French slang.

Now, their is a huge cultural gap between American and French people as to what slang means and is used for.

In a nutshell: for Americans, slang is used by people to sound either cool or offensive. Most slang words are sexual in nature. The cornerstone word here is obviously 'fuck': a English to slang English dictionary would read: car = fucking car, nose = fucking nose, foot = fucking foot, boxer short = fucking boxer fucking short.

For French folks, slang is just a set of alternative words for every day, casual conversations. They are used by mostly everybody (and notably by our dear president), and yes, even by my mother, and if you have to know, even by my mother's mother (although the 20 year rule I mentioned implies that I am left mostly blank when she curses). And although we certainly have slang words for all sexual topics, as I guess any other language in the world does, French has the particularity of having slang words for virtually anything else -- and these words would not necessarly have an offensive implication. Sometimes they even sound cute, or just funny. By contrast, then, a French to French argot dictionary would read: car = bagnole, caisse, nose = pif, tarbouif, foot = panard, peton, boxer short = calbute.

And as a disclaimer, I would stamp this slang with a 'circa 1990' label. As for wine, don't trust French slang without a date label.

Slang is definitely an important part of the French language. My mother, for instance, is a slang encyclopedia on her own. From early morning, when she gets out of the pieu, till the evening in front of the téloche, the day with her is a continuous and charming display of a French you won't find in your language book. Being a teacher, it has always been a mystery, and quite frankly, a source of concern for me how she could switch back to textbook French twice a week in front of her students. But then again, we don't have that much slang for chemistry.

Growing up in such a vocabulary-wise diverse environment, I naturally caught up most of the slang. And that's were the cultural gap is: if asked, my mother would tell you she is proud of me.

I could not speak about French slang without mentionning particular one, the verlan, which stands for (à) l'envers (meaning 'backwards') when read... backwards. Indeed, the rule of this particular kind of slang is to speak words backwards, syllable-wise. So, Français (French) becomes Céfran, méchant ('mean', or 'cool') becomes chanmé, lourd becomes relou, etc. Sometimes, verlan holds on words that are already slang words, like keum, which is the verlan of mec which is the slang for 'guy'. I even heard people talking about feumeu, which turned out to the verlan for meuf... which is already the verlan for femme (woman)!

And of course, slang comes with different regional flavors. Marseilles is known for having quite a few slang words of their own, for instance.

At this point, and since you are a regular reader, you are now thinking: "Hey! Slang being so extensive and popular, that's certainly something that should piss the Académiciens off!".

U-hu. Don't underestimate a bunch of old folks with nothing better to do than reading teenage girl magazines. Plus, remember that before being old, everybody has been young once. Believe it or not, slang is actually listed and updated in the distinguished encyclopedia they edit. I told you slang is part of our language.

Personnally, I grew up with a copy of the Bouquets des expressions imagées in the living room, a book entirely dedicated to wild slang words and expressions through the ages (yes, that's about 1400 pages of fine prints), which probably made me the slang poet I am now. (You will find it amusing that the author of this book taught English as a living. I am convinced he wrote this book because of the same sense of frustration with English slang, and the esteem of French slang that consequently arose, as the one I am experiencing now).

So next time you curse, don't apologize. And if a "Pardon my French" inadvertently slips between your lips, I will consider that as a tribute to our ingenuity and creativity in that domain.

The war on words

The French are known for fighting for their language. You know it. Oh yes, you all know it, and I know you know because you keep reminding me every time I meet your for the first time.

So it's about time we get down on the issue of the Académie Française.

Nearly 400 years ago, this institution was given the job of unifying the different French dialects that were used at that time troughout France into a single language that could be spoken and understood by everybody. If you have seen the movie Hero, well, it's exactly the same story here, except less sexy: Although the Académiciens do have a sword, their arthrosis prevents them from doing any backflip jump or mawashi geri kick to the throat, and I am almost certain Zhang Ziyi is not part of the cast.

A few dozen thousand pages later, the grand task is done. The One And Unique Pure French is finally on paper, if not spoken on the street. Now, with plenty of time on their hands, and not unlike kids that would have drawn a hopscotch on Broadway, the Académiciens can spend the rest of their lives fighting to preserve it, and that's indeed what they have been doing ever since. Not always the same ones, mind you -- although by the look of it, it might be that we still have some survivors from the earliest times.

Part of the misunderstanding is that, since the Académie has been lying in the middle of Paris for centuries, folks out there think we care. I mean, come on: Isn't the UN based in New York?

The Académiciens. Oh well, you know how we French people are with our old folks: We respect their privacy a lot, so rather than embarrassing them with our presence, we would rather store them away in some shelter. Well, the Académie is one of them, but an elite one, because although it takes a fair share of squared meters in the heart of Paris, there is room for only 40 old goats, and one cannot enter if the rest of the herd bloats in protest. And I am sure that there are a couple of unofficial rules as well, like being over 95, reading exclusively from dead authors, or not having been in contact with fresh products, farm animals or young people in the last 20 years.

You will probably be surprised, like the rest of us, that these revered wise old men call themselves les immortels -- yes, you read it, 'the immortals'. That's not exactly the first thing that comes to my mind when I look at their pictures, but hey, I guess that's good news: You can work all your life on grammar and still keep your sense of humor till the end. That, or their ego is even bigger than the encyclopedia they edit.

However, they are known throughout the world not because of their ability to speak in a delicate, beautiful, tear-drawing French with all the liaisons done on the fly (beat that, Deep Blue), but because they are officially in charge of adding new words to the language, and that usually involves not simply taking the ones everybody is already using and familiar with. First, because new words are mostly imported from other languages, and French should remain as French as possible. Second, because the immortals know better.

Actually, I don't know why people make such a fuss about the French trying to coin French words for new concepts everytime they can. In languages like Chinese, they go through this process all the time, mainly because, lacking a phonetical alphabet, they have to. But so far, I haven't heard of any Chinese that has been taunted on that topic.

And sometimes, just sometimes, the words picked by our favorite shut-in antiques click. The most representative, I think, is logiciel, which stands for 'software'.

That's where it should stop. Unfortunately, the immortals are as stubborn as old folks can be. They want to control all the words. And that, my friends, is a very bad idea when you live in a technology-driven world where words and idioms are born and die faster than Microsoft can patch Windows (hell, the 'e-' and 'cyber-' prefixes were so cool just a few years ago!), while you just have a bunch of 40 old bookworms, for whom the word 'chip' is invariably associated with 'fish', to do the job.

I was talking last time about the word 'blog', for instance. As far as I know, there is yet no such French equivalent (that is, except 'blog' itself, of course), and thus, given the recent burst of popularity of this medium, you would expect urgent and intense debate on that topic.

Ooooh, not so fast.

Right now, fiercy battles are fought over this word by your average foot soldier engaged in the language war. Foot soldiers that are way, way upfront in the battle. A handful of guys debating over it using the internet, with actual computers. And believe me, the fight is ugly. Our crusaders draw their pens and lash some blogue, journal virtuel, journel, joueb, cybercarnet, carnet Web, fighting against anglicism until the last drop of ink, even if it means creating words even more obscure, hideous and unpronounceable than the original.

What do our dear rosy oldsters have to say about that? Do the generals have a plan? Knowing some of their previous suggestions for other words, there is absolutely no doubt that they couldn't care less about what the rest of us think, including those aforementioned brave bloggers. Sometimes, I even wonder if their sense of humor does not reach unsuspected levels -- after all, given their age, the whole Après moi, le déluge philosophy might apply.

If you take a look at the last edition of their encyclopedia, though, the list of new words includes the state-of-the-art... fax and disquette (floppy disk). *Sigh*. Note, this could have been different if our hard-working immortals would have dare to update the encyclopedia since the last 1994 edition.

In the meanwhile, Merriam-Webster celebrates 'blog' as the word of the year 2004 -- along with its definition, naturally.

I guess we will have to wait another 10 years to start blogging legally in French.

The French language

You may see the French as a proud and arrogant crowd -- and you would not be completely wrong, but then at this point most people jump to the conclusion that these traits somehow unite us against foreigners in a French conspiracy involving rude service and €7 expressos. Well, nothing could be further from the truth, and you might get some comfort in knowing that being French won't spare you the attitude from the waiter -- that is, unless you are a pretty-looking girl having lunch with an empty seat of yours, in which case we enter a completely different world I save for later.

However, there are some topics which every French foetus is genetically modified to agree on and that could even league holigans from Paris and Marseilles soccer teams together, although nobody ever dared to try. And this is one of them: French is the most beautiful language in the world.

When I was born, genetical engineering was not yet as accurate as it is now, and while I never doubted about this fundamental truth, I was curious as a child about what made our language so great. As I grew up, it progressively came to me that the main reason why French people love so much their language is that they can't really master another one.

One point I have often heard, is that French sounds good. I can't really say myself; it is tricky to figure out how your own language might sound to the ear of other folks. However, many of my foreigner friends think so, and in the sweat illusion that friendship is not based on mainly insincere compliments and feel-good soothings, I have come to admit this is true.

Now that's hardly enough to make French the number 1 language. Well, sure, if you sound like Dutch, you are not even qualified for the race, but we can't pretend to take over the world on bases where Italian has a lead.

Another point I have heard is that French, as opposed to English, is rigorous and accurate; and when it comes from such writers as Samuel Beckett, you have to pay attention. I am not sure what is exactly meant by that, but as far as I understand, the accuracy of French is precisely what makes it not as flexible as English. It is a trade-off, really.

Let me illustrate this point with an everyday situation I am sure you have already experienced. You receive an e-mail from your buddy to meet him at 5, and he asks you to please, please not forget your rabbit shoes, this is of the utmost importance. Now you are in trouble: which rabbit shoes is he exactly talking about? Your shoes made of rabbit fur that your wife bought you the year you forgot her birthday? Your shoes in the shape of a rabbit that your daughter made for Father's day, which reminds you that you still haven't retaliate on her teacher? Is it those special shoes you use whenever you do your rabbit business, whatever that could be? Or is that those shoes for rabbits that a fashion designer in love with his favorite pet has created, and that you own for mysterious reasons? Well, at time like these, you are sorry your friend is not communicating in French, because then he couldn't have use such loose relationship and he would have had to explicitely say whether he is speaking of the chaussures en lapin, the chaussure pour lapin, the chaussure à lapin, or your chaussure en forme de lapin.

Personnally I find it a small advantage. I don't own any rabbit shoes and don't plan on owning some -- of any kind.

Now that we are still not convinced and have run short of labeled advantages, we are on our own and have to plunge head first inside the language. That's were trouble begins.

French is an extremely chaotic and complicated language. If you ever wondered why the inventors of fractals like Mandelbrot and Julia were all French, look no further.

I am not even talking about genders here. Genders are usually the first thing that discourage English-speaking folks from learning further -- and yet this is the easy part. You just have to acknowledge that the gender (either masculine or feminine in French) of a word has nothing to do with a sex all French mentally visualize while talking. (Well, we do, but that's an other topic and irrelevant to grammar.) This is true not only for objects but even to some extent for people: For example, a guard in French is une sentinelle, and although it is feminine, it is hardly a job anyone would associate specifically with women.

Plus, once you have learned genders for French, you are mostly good for other Latin languages, such as Spanish or Italian. See? We do make some efforts for you. That, and the euro.

French can be a mess, and unfortunately it takes an outsider's look to realize it. Same thing with art, if you ask me. So whenever you meet one of your French or artist friend, help him and talk to him. As for me, I started to realize how irrational French is when I was asked by puzzled foreigners to explain some very simple points -- say, when to use bien and when to use bon, both meaning 'good' -- that I never even considered.

The first difficulty comes from the spelling. Some languages have a very simple relationship between speech and writing, like Spanish, Italian or German: basically, there is only one way to pronounce a letter, and one way to write a syllable. These are mostly WYHIWYW languages (What You Hear Is What You Write).

Well, I don't know which unit they use to measure the closeness of pronunciation to writting in a language, but I am sure they always need extra paper when French is in the graph. There are many consonants that you do not pronounce (unless you do), or that are doubled; there are many ways to write the same sound; and we are perhaps the only language to use accents (like î ) for absolutely no reason at all, except historical ones.

The fact is, this is far too complicated for most French people as well. Writting a cover letter without any spelling mistake requires locking the kids away in the garage and a tablet of this medicine you used as a student to focus during your math exams. And, as it happened to me, no matter how much time you spend perfecting your application and tracking every single small spelling mistake, including all those damn plurals, the refusal letter you get back might contain some big ones.

The next difficulty is the liaisons, the fact that silent consonants at the end of some words should be pronounced if the next word starts with a voyel. In theory, this is all nice and simple. Keep in mind that French do all kind of complicated tricks to actually keep things simple -- to speak. So the idea here is to never have to pronounce two consecutive voyels, because that would keep you mouth open for too long and you cigarette might drop. Ever wondered why French has some extra t's in such expressions as où va-t-il? Same reason.

Now, you are probably thinking, 'Wow! When they chat, those French dudes actually have to think whether a word ends with a silent consonant, and the next word starts with a voyel, and then make the correct liaison! They must have an entire lobe dedicated to speaking.' Well, that's precisely where the nice and simple theory ends. In practice, liaisons are almost never made, except by some old guys gently dozing at the Académie Française, still trying to figure out a French word for 'blog' that Victor Hugo would not mind. In some cases, a liaison would even sound weird (like in tu parles a qui?: a liaison there is sure to raise eyebrows) . So you never care about it -- unless you absolutely have to. (If you are not familiar with this kind of logic, you are probably not advanced yet in your study of French). And you generally have to when words involved are common and frequent, like vous allez or deux amis. Even the illiterate would make the liaison there, simply because we would barely understand otherwise. Still, this is just a vague guideline, because for instance, in je vais aller, 'I am going', which is obviously a pretty common combination, virtually nobody will do the liaison there. Sorry folks! So forget about the rule and just do as we say. This would also be your first lesson in French politics as well. (Wow, I am starting to realize I have blog material for the next decade).

French also uses a lot of structures that doesn't make much sense to me. To ask "What is it?", instead of a simple Qu'est-ce? that you might find in pedantic books, we prefer to say Qu'est-ce que c'est?, litteraly "What is this what this is?". Est-ce que does it make any sense? No. So eventually people ended up asking questions by simply raising their voice at the end of a sentence. Tu pars, "You are leaving". Tu pars?, "Are you leaving?" C'est quoi? Much simpler.

Worst of all are the verb tenses and conjugations. We have loads of tenses -- passé simple, subjonctif, whatever -- and believe me, none of us really know when or how to use them. We are aware there are some rules as for which past tense to use in which situation, and sure, if we were to write a book, we would certainly open those dusty grammar books again. As far as real life goes, however, we mainly do as we please, and that usually means that we stick to the simplest form. (For example, you will hardly hear any passé simple or subjonctif forms, and most future use the simple aller+V immediate future form).

I never realized as a kid that my French teachers were genuine heroes.

It all started with a movie

Let me get this straight: As a Frenchman working in the USA, you won't find many of my compatriots thinking I am a fully functional representative of the species. Even within the category of expatriated traitors, I raise suspicion since I don't particularly like to hang out with other French dudes talking for hours about how things as fundamental as cheese and bread are so much better over there. I guess this will get even worse now that I have started this blog -- in English.

Well, don't call me an American either. Frenchs would say so of me. Now, when Americans start agreeing with Frenchs, you know something went wrong. And wrong it would be. Before you start calling me 'buddy', consider this: I haven't own a TV for the last past 7 years. I chose my place so that I could shop walking. I couldn't care less about baseball, basketball and football. And today, Black Friday, when frantic housewives in pajamas were lining up at 5 a.m to buy cartloads of eletronics, I was still sleeping and not feeling guilty about it. I haven't set foot even in a medium-sized mall since.

And yet I started this blog feeling that it is about time France and the rest of the world get a little update on each other. Granted, I am certainly not the best guy for the job. I tend to look at facts first and have a reasonable and moderate opinion, which makes me clearly an outsider of both sides. But that's okay, because nobody cares. French would freeze in the middle of a bewildered smile when suggested that maybe not all Americans are fat evengelical trigger-happy ignorant Republicans. 83% of Americans slip into mild coma when realizing that showers are standard appliances used by a significant percentage of French households.

These cliches have been around for a while now, but I understand that things are only getting worse. A petty but reliable indicator in the last few years has been this new fashion to put some low-key, useless bad French guys in movies -- you know he is French, not because you understand the insults he mumbles, but because of the accordéon melody that precedes his appearance. He would also have one or more of the following easily recognizable features: a dark navy stripe shirt, a mustache, a beret, a long nose, a terrible accent, a composed name like Jean-Marie or Pierre-Jacques. I have just seen The Incredibles (an otherwise very funny flick), and it has to be there. It was quick, it was subtle, it was tempered -- but it was there.

Usually, I would rather count blows while lying in my bathtub filled with a warm and comfortable mix of irony and cynicism. This time I decided to stick my head out of the water.

But as I step out of the bath and make my first steps on unfamiliar ground, I would ask you to look away until I grab a towel.