The author, John Marek, is a writer and CEO of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
My high school offered classes in three foreign languages, Spanish, German and French. My buddies Jeff and Carl took German and Fred took Spanish, which considering his ethnic heritage was something of a slam dunk, but, hey, I know lots of English-speakers who fared poorly in high school English. I took French because I thought it was the most “sophisticated” of the options. The French are fond of saying their language is the only one spoken natively on all seven continents, and that may be true (Antarctica, really? You’re counting that?), but from a practical business standpoint it may not have been the best choice.
After four years of meticulously studying the French language, I could count to somewhere around 20 (vingt), tell you the day of the week (Jeudi), and explain how to get from the church (l’eglise) to the train station (le gare), a navigational skill applicable to a very specific request relating to lost honeymooners. As Steve Martin once noted, “Boy, those French; they have a different word for everything.”
Oddly, I also remember the very first lesson in my French I textbook.
J’entre dans le class
J’ouvre le livre Français
J’étudie la leçon
Je ferme le livre
For those of you from the less sophisticated part of Antarctica, it tells the scintillating story of entering the classroom, opening the French book, studying the lesson and closing the book. As I was writing that paragraph, I had to think extra hard about the le’s and la’s, because, in French, objects have gender. A pen is male (le stylo). A pencil (la crayon) is female. [Insert your own, “But it identifies as …” joke here.] I was always fascinated by the idea that some Francophone linguists sat down at a point in history and decided whether inanimate objects were boys or girls. That’s a lot of pressure. Cake (le gateau) still holds a grudge.
Although I now believe Spanish or German would have served my professional career better, there was one shining moment when all the nous, vous and assorted eaux’s came in handy. In May 2014 I accompanied the Charlotte Regional Partnership on a business recruiting trip to Quebec. While we stayed overnight in Montreal, where everything is bilingual, we had a couple of meetings scheduled in rural parts of the province, where the English was “spotty” and the locals touchy about that fact. Don’t get me wrong; I can no longer speak nor understand spoken French, if I ever could, but put a menu in front of me and with a bit of pondering, I can avoid ordering the octopus (la pieuvre) stuffed porcupine (le porc-epic). The strangest thing about that trip, though, was being greeted by the hotel staff each morning with an irony-free “bonjour.”
Sophistiqué, indeed!