Tag: Martina Reese

2. How to be spiritual in French.

2015—11 October

I knew something was fishy when I saw the subtitle, La première chose qui m’est venu à l’esprit, while hearing the swords spoken, “the first thing I thought of.” This happened, I’m pretty sure, during my phase of binge-watching the HBO show In Treatment with French subtitles.

The first thing I thought was, hey, the translator must have screwed up and mistranslated “mind” as esprit, because of course esprit means “spirit,” right? Imagine my chagrin (the word chagrin exists in French, but, confusingly, it doesn’t mean “chagrin,” it means “sorrow” or “grief”) at discovering that the most common contemporary usage of esprit relates more closely to “mind” than “spirit.” It’s….well…dispiriting to be so sure of something and to find oneself so mistaken.

Sure, at times the demarcation between mind and spirit is vague, whether you speak English or French. Ils jouent aux cartes le vendredi soir pour leur détendrent l’esprit means “They play cards on Friday nights to relax their minds” (or is it their spirits they’re relaxing?). But the preponderance of French dictionary usages clearly inclines toward understanding esprit as “mind”: avoir l’esprit clair (“to be a clear thinker”), avoir l’esprit étroit (“to be narrow-minded”), avoir l’esprit mal tourné (“to have a dirty mind”).

Turning to the adjective form of esprit, spirituel, what does an English speaker find? Do we of the “I’m spiritual, not religious” culture have to rethink how we talk about it in French? Apparently so. Spirituel may serve to convey “spiritual” in the sense that English-speakers mean it, but for the French that’s a really a secondary meaning. The more common meaning for the word spirituel today is what we would call in English “witty.”

There are instances where someone or something is both “spiritual” and “witty”—the Dalai Lama comes to mind…er, vient à l’esprit. Then there are things that are spiritual but not witty (Trappist monks). And, of course, there are things that are witty but not spiritual (frankly, that’s what I’m hoping for here).

What does it mean that if someone says the word esprit, a French speaker hears “mind” and I hear “spirit”? What does it mean that when someone says spirituel, I think “spiritual” and a French speaker thinks “witty”? Might this be the linguistic key that explains something about how we think, live, and feel differently?

Here’s what my friend Adèle had to say: “That’s all pretty interesting, especially when you think about…” Actually, she said Intéressant tout ça, spécialement quand on pense aussi à… (and here she switched into English) “…spiritual, which in American has come to mean this vague drive towards an even more vague but elevated state of mind, while for us, the same word means ‘witty.’”

So, then, do French-speakers have their own, different way of seeking an elevated state of mind? And if so, what is it? Could Marcel Proust be a guide? Is the energized intoxication and heightened awareness that Proust achieved in Swann’s Way through a potent combination of obsessiveness and sleep deprivation an avenue that English speakers could try when meditation classes, reiki, and detox diets fail to raise us to the next level of consciousness?

© 2015 Martha Reese

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1. How do you say earworm in French? 

2015—4 October

Yesterday, while swimming the 36 laps that make a mile, the word mutine popped into my head. Mutine? I knew there was such a word, and that it was French, but what did it mean? And why was it pushing its way to the surface of my consciousness just then, so inconveniently, in the pool?

I knew I had recently encountered the word. Was it while flipping through one of the old issues of Vogue France that populates the messy pile in my bathroom? Had I looked it up in the dictionary? Had I meant to look it up but not gotten around to it? Had I looked it up, seen its meaning, but forgotten it, then forgotten that I’d forgotten?

There it was—mutine—insistent as a pop-song earworm. A lurker word. A swimming pool stalker. Could I both keep track of the lap-count (six sets of six) and remember to remember mutine long enough to look it up when I had finished my swim? Mutine. Three. Mutine. Four. Mutine. Five. Mutine. Six.

Back in the locker room, I immediately used my cell phone French-English dictionary app to search up mutine and found that it is the feminine form of mutin, an adjective that means “mischievous,” “impish,” or “cheeky.”

Oh. Now I know. Or do I? Will I remember?

As a US-born native speaker of English, I’ve spent my life inundated by a ceaseless stream of American English. Learning new vocabulary and syntax in my mother tongue has been almost effortless—an unnoticed, incremental, life-long process.

Learning French as an adult is by contrast laborious and often frustrating. While a French-speaking child has heard le parapluie (the umbrella) with the correct masculine article a thousand times by the time he/she begins to make words, a non-French-speaking learner must memorize the gender of parapluie, and might easily make the mistake of saying la parapluie. After all, it would be correct to say la pluie (the rain). And that’s just one word.

The more I know the more I realize how much I do not know.

Nevertheless (néamoins), we are resolute, intrepid in our approach to the fascinating and completely individualized process of language acquisition. If we persist, a word or phrase goes from being something we’ve never seen or heard, to something we’ve encountered once or twice but don’t know what it means, to something whose meaning we’ve learned temporarily but don’t remember, to something we understand if we read or hear it in context, to something we can confidently deploy in conversation.

And after hundreds of hours, we still talk like babies. We stumble and are struck dumb while uttering mundane questions such as, “Are my bra straps showing?” On voit les bretelles de mon soutien gorge? Or, “Why didn’t that jerk signal before cutting into the lane in front of me?” Pourquoi ce sale type n’a pas mis son clignotant avant de se coller devant moi sur cette voie d’autoroute?

Discovering a new French word for the very first time is, for me, as intriguing as pondering why I have five toes on my foot and not four or six. Acquiring a useful new phrase is as thrilling as reflecting on the nature of yellow. Understanding how ideas are expressed differently in French and English is as absorbing as witnessing that butter when exposed to heat becomes soft, while eggs become firm.

This morning I remembered that I did not remember the meaning of béant. I looked it up immediately, being on the train at the time. It means “gaping,” or “yawning.” It pairs nicely with la fissure (crack), le trou (hole), la déchirure (tear, rip), or l’abîme (chasm, abyss).

On me dit qu’on ne dit pas “earworm” en français.

© 2015 Martha Reese

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