Ope Pardon, No. 12: Entrées

I have had a phenomenally bad week.

So bad that when, on Friday morning, I told my therapist everything that had happened, she laughed! (Don't worry, I was already in the slap-happy phase of acceptance myself and said she could.) I told her that I had a feeling it was going to get worse that day too.

And I was right! It did!

Anyways, I am writing this Saturday morning and am feeling much better. I went to the gym and got some endorphins in my bloodstream; I slept well and woke early; the Warriors won and the banger Bucks-Celtics series is going to Game 7; I'm going out tonight with pals and Jack is going to his favorite sitter. All in all, feeling positively. Woohoo.

However, I am also still feeling a little residually salty and am therefore going to channel that energy into a totally inconsequential rant about the French language that actually applies to all languages but French is the one most present in my life at the moment so we're ranting about French.

Please, I am begging: If you are going to adopt words from other languages, keep their goddamn meanings. Use them correctly! Make them make sense!

Listen, I am a huge fan of integrating foreign words into whatever language you are speaking. There are some truly great words out there that can't be translated directly and I think it adds depth and richness to the vocabulary you're operating in. It's also frequently practical, especially when a word is new and was coined or originated in a certain language!

At its best, English is indicative of the upside of this exchange. There are a billion words for everything in English and the breadth of, let's call it, source material is part of what makes English such a fun language to speak or write. I think the expansion of "formal" English to include more words and grammatical constructions from both English dialects and different root languages is a good thing! I love that English is, as the meme/quote/Etsy decoration goes, a language that doesn't borrow from other languages, it follows them down dark alleys, knocks them over, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar and valuable vocabulary.

However, what I can't abide is when you adopt words and then change their meanings, to the point that a native speaker no longer has any clue what you are talking about. Or when you invoke a phrase using foreign words that does not actually mean anything in the language you are smooshing together.

Now I apologize: I have made the mistake of starting this rant without first compiling a list of examples, despite this being a grudge I have nurtured for at least a year. But here's one.

The other day a guy said that he wasn't looking "[to do] un one shot." Now, context clues told me that he was not referring to recreating that iconic True Detective sequence, but I had to hop on over to Google to confirm my understanding of words in my own language!!

And to be fair English doesn't always make sense in English either. We change the meaning of words with reckless abandon, often ascribing meaning and its antithesis to the same word. There are several expressions I have tried to suss out the logic of as I've tried to explain them to a non-native speaker and come up empty. English is a lawless language that runs on whims and context.

But that's our right. It's the right of all native speakers. It is a privilege for anyone borrowing words for their own language. If you want to come up with or retain nonsensical/historical expressions, like "giving someone a rabbit" to refer to standing someone up, so be it, just keep that shit to your own language.

(I read once that you could tell someone spends too much time on Twitter because they are constantly thinking of the ways their writing can be misinterpreted and pre-emptively trying to address those concerns in ways that take you out of the piece. Because I am one such person, let me just say I have not thought this out on a macro geopolitical level with respect to cultural or linguistic ownership, colonialism, etc. etc. etc. and there are surely flaws in my dramatic generalizations. I promise I do not mean anything deeper than "please stop confusing me with your English menu item names.")

There are, as always, some exceptions. For example, the French call friends with benefits "sex friends." Best I can tell this is because the 2011 modern classic Friends With Benefits starring Mila Kunis and JT was released as Sex Friends here. The French also love to rename American movies with new titles that are still in English but just worse English. But anyways, sex friends: great! Very clear and less clunky than FWB.

What else? I am not even going to begin to address le wokisme, mostly because woke is a word we have absolutely lost the plot on in English too.

This problem is even more present in professional spaces. I have spent literal weeks going off just vibes and context clues when my coworkers use English, which is, ironically, how I did just define English, so maybe they're more fluent than they realize. (Truly, shout out to every English teacher that taught me reading comprehension. Maybe even shout out to the SAT, too? No, no, that's too far.) In any case, the number of times a French person has said something in English and I have had no fucking clue what they meant is getting to be significantly greater than when they have said something in French that I haven't understood. And it's not just me! This is something I've heard from multiple Anglophone people in the city, especially those working in French offices.

(As a side rant, it drives me absolutely insane that we change city names between languages. Very few cities are impossibly hard to pronounce in their local tongue. I'm not saying everyone has to hit the heavy TH when they talk about Barcelona, I'm just saying if you can pronounce Rome you can pronounce Roma. Do not even get me started on Seria A team names. AC Milan? Your acronym is in Italian and your city name is in English! Make it make sense!!)

And again, I don't want to be too hard on the French. English is not innocent: We took the word "entrée," which very intuitively refers to a starter dish and decided that in the U.S. it would actually refer to the main course. We took the word for coat rack and decided it should mean "a word that is a combination of two other words." I am sure we have done unspeakable things to the Spanish language on the Taco Bell menu alone. I am certain it happens in every language under the sun. And as I said before, I would much rather have this exchange of words than enforce strict boundaries between languages. I am not a language purist by a long shot.

But man, it is looney tunes to recognize your own language and be utterly lost as to what the words are supposed to mean.