Having lived in France for close to four months, I can feel my grasp of French getting stronger.
But the more I understand what is being spoken around me, the more I’ve come to realize that a lot of French is just plain bizarre.
Every language has its oddities, of course, English itself being no exception. But there are some words and formulations in French that stick out to me for their seeming nonsensicality.
Here are three concepts that have blown my mind in more ways than one.
Frankly speaking
If you live in France for a while, you start to notice something peculiar. Well, I guess there are lots of things you might find peculiar if you searched hard enough. But one thing that does stick out is the ubiquity of a certain word: franchement.
It’s the French equivalent of “frankly”, but frankly you’d hear the former far more frequently than its English counterpart. This may be in part because while “frankly” tends to be used to introduce a negative sentiment (e.g. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”), franchement is decidedly neutral in tone and can be used in both positive and negative contexts. In other words, franchement is, ironically, more similar to “honestly” than “frankly”. You could conceivably say, “Franchement, c’est très cool” as a sentence, and while “Frankly, that’s really cool” might sound a little off, “Honestly, that’s really cool” would sound normal enough.
But franchement isn’t just a like-for-like replacement for “honestly”. It’s also used on its own in a one-word sentence. The other week, I was riding in an Uber in the 17th arrondissement during Friday afternoon gridlock. As the driver was driving down a road, a cyclist suddenly appeared out of nowhere. While they narrowly avoided colliding, the cyclist wasn’t terribly impressed. Crossing the front of the car, she came up to the driver’s window and shouted, “Franchement !” What later followed was an angry tirade about the driver’s driving skills, as one would expect in such circumstances, but even then I still found it interesting that an angry rant could begin in such a way.
I suppose her franchement wasn’t so much a single-word sentence as it was the first word in a longer sentence divided in two by a pregnant silence. But even then, could you imagine such a sentence in English? In a similar scenario, it’s hard to imagine an irate cyclist yelling “Honestly!” at a motorist, saying nothing for three seconds, and then launching into an indignant rant about how they nearly got run over.
And yet it seems perfectly normal in French.
I had noticed a similar situation in the 8th arrondissement near Madeleine, when, following a similar collision, the cyclist shouted “Justement !” at the driver, a word that I still don’t really understand.
And, well, frankly, it was pretty bizarre.
You say re-hello and I say re-goodbye
It’s common knowledge that bonjour is the French equivalent of “hello” or “good morning”. But it’s more complicated than that.
You see, in France, the rule of thumb seems to be that you can only say bonjour to the same person once a day. If you said bonjour to them at 9am, and then saw them again at 11am, you couldn’t say bonjour again because they would probably retort, “You’ve already said bonjour”. They might even feel slightly offended, because in repeating the greeting, it’s as if you had forgotten that you had greeted them the first time around, which might in turn suggest that you hadn’t fully acknowledged their presence or that they just didn’t matter enough to you for you to recall seeing them.
So to get around the faux pas of saying bonjour twice, French people might add the prefix “re-” to the word. From time to time, you could hear re-bonjour, re-salut or even re-hello. I’ve received quite a few work emails that have begun with re-hello, with the rest of the text appearing in French. It’s amusing, not just because it sounds a little ridiculous, but also because no one in the English-speaking world would ever begin an email with “Hello”. So, ironically, by reading an email beginning with “Hello”, you can know right away that the writer isn’t a native speaker of English.
But to get back to the point, it’s interesting how the use of bonjour can be fraught with such (admittedly rather low-stakes) tensions that the use of “re-” seems to have been invented to get around them. Because in contrast, no one would bat an eyelid if you said “hello” or “hi” to them more than once during the same day. So while greetings exist for the sake of friendliness, they take on a gravity in French that is all but non-existent in English.
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together
You know how if we wanted to express the idea in English that “My friend and I went to the beach”, we might say “We went to the beach with my friend”? Of course you don’t. No one would speak like that. It makes zero sense when you’re referring to just the two of you.
And yet, you can speak like that in French. It’s taken me a while to get my head around this, but in French, you can say something like, “On est allé à la plage avec Kevin” (“We went to the beach with Kevin”) even if you and Kevin were the only ones who went there. In other words, “On est allé à la plage avec Kevin” is identical in meaning to “Kevin et moi sommes allés à la plage” (“Kevin and I went to the beach”).
Naturally, this may sound extremely bizarre to non-French ears. After all, if the pronoun “on” is used to express the idea of “we”, then why use it at all? Why not simply say “Kevin et moi sommes allés au parc”? After all, if the word “we” suggests that two or more people (one of whom being the speaker) are partaking in a certain activity, wouldn’t the “avec Kevin” (“with Kevin”) bit at the end suggest that they were an additional person being talked about, and not one of the ones implied in the word “we”? If you said in English that “We went to the park with Kevin”, one would think that at least three people went to the park: the speaker, someone else, and Kevin. But this isn’t necessarily the case in French.
Of course, I’m aware that the third person pronoun “on” doesn’t exactly mean “we” but more something along the lines of “one”. However, French people tend to use it as a more casual stand-in for “nous”. It’s common to hear people begin sentences like, “Nous, on a fait des courses,” where the “nous” is used emphatically at the beginning, before switching to “on” to conjugate with. What’s more, you can also say “Nous sommes allés à la plage avec Kevin” (“We went to the beach with Kevin”) when it was just you and Kevin who went there. So the pronoun “on” isn’t the issue. It’s simply the use of a formulation in French that makes no sense in English.
So why say “On est allé à la plage avec Kevin” or “Nous sommes allé à la plage avec Kevin” when you could simply say, “Kevin et moi sommes allés à la plage”? To be honest, I think it comes down to laziness. By using the word “on”, you can imply that you and someone else did an activity, and then attach the “avec Kevin” later on to make it clear who is implicated in the “we”. And while you could say pretty much the same thing if you said “Je suis allé à la plage avec Kevin”, I suppose there’s a sense of complicité inherent in the pronouns “on” and “nous” that isn’t present in “je”.
Of course, I’m no expert, and I’m just speculating to try and make sense of it all. But frankly, I think it’s a little weird and I hope that when it comes to this formulation, we are on the same page with me.
