Heir raising
Oh, I am sorry about the protracted silence.
I sometimes wonder whether there isn’t an end to what anyone has to say, despite the infinity of subjects at hand. Plus, there are times when your own mind bores even you, and you doubt the appeal of everything it produces (for instance that bit about how I discovered that pichiciego is another name for fairy armadillo.)
A few weeks ago, J. Robinson wrote to me about a new book called The genius of language. Edited by Wendy Lesser, it’s a book of 15 essays by multilingual authors about their relationship with their mother tongue.
I’m about halfway through, reading in disorder. Aside from a few unforgivable typos (tu est) in a book about language, I found some of the contributions a little bland – or probably just not quite what I’d expected. Unlike Conrad or Nabokov or Bianciotti, most all the contributors write in their native tongue, so they have not had to translate themselves for an adopted culture, and largely enjoy the influence of another language on their relationship to words and ideas. But it is a great subject, and sweet the common thread of a form of homesickness when speaking of their second language(s).
Of course all the authors pepper their essays with foreign words, and I kept wondering why some provided translations and others didn’t. I can’t help feel there’s a certain smugness (and a bit of a cheat) in keeping it to yourself.
Around our house, French is the language spoken most often, the language of jokes and reprimands and homework. And I’ve never quite known how to reconcile the fact that my children are growing up in a different culture from my own.
There is an odd gap that can only be bridged with boring explanations that begin, ‘when I was a girl…’ – which invariably makes me feel like one of those stranded immigrant housewives who people Toronto’s “little” neighbourhoods, wiping my hands on my housecoat as I sigh and go misty with thoughts of the old country. ‘Oh, Francesco…’
They’ve never seen The Brady Bunch or I Love Lucy, so I’m unable to gauge their minds with familiar markers. And even though my son loves Bugs Bunny as much as I did, Mel Blanc is sorely absent, the jokes aren’t as good and, damn it, they’ve changed the names (as you’d expect, Pepe le Pew does not work in French).
So it’s just not the same show. And even though they like dumb and dirty jokes as much as I did (uh, do), most of my dusty repertoire falls flat in translation.
Attempts to provide them with equivalents of my favourite bedtime stories required research, and there was no nostalgia in my voice when I sang French lullabies. Plus I’ve had to brush up on my French kings and queens, and which river runs through what (please don’t quiz me).
Even more than language, I’ve failed them in social graces. I realized a little too late that I had not schooled my kids on the bise (the ritual cheek kissing hello and goodbye). I didn’t grow up with it, and still try to get away with only the hello part. Unless you’re awfully fond of them, kissing a roomful of people goodbye just seems like so much work.
Girls catch onto the ritual earlier than boys, and are already kissing each other bonjour and ciao by the time they’re 12. But my son still flinches when he sees an adult cheek lunging towards him, lips puckered. (The same boy who, at the age of 5, used to rub his hands over women’s buttocks, saying, ‘mmm, nice’ and would occasionally walk up to a stranger in the street and, for no apparent reason, punch him in the nuts.)
I also forgot to tell them about tu and vous. I suppose I figured they’d just catch on. During the early years, kids address everyone with the familiar tu but, by the age of 10, are expected to make the distinction. I had a sudden bout of panic, certain my kids were going around insulting their elders, and that I’d soon be hauled into the principal’s office to explain. Turns out, they’d caught on.
Despite my occasional glaring awareness of my foreignness, I suppose I can at least take comfort in knowing that my aversion to French rap and the idiocy of SMS is shared by native-born parents across the country.
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Comment
- good morning.
It’s like coming home to a hot bowl of soup after spending all day in a storm. (...to find something here to read again.)
My Nicaraguence family will still refer to things (songs, customs, places…) from “back home” and, at almost 30 and after living in Managua a short while, I still don’t feel like I know this place (their Nicaragua) at all.
— ~A Sep 27, 9:37am # - Oh boy, the kissing thing! ;)
My origin is Croatian, and as the French, Croatians literally love to kiss each other for hello and goodbye. Having grown up in Germany where this way of greeting is largely unknown and completely uncommon, it was difficult for me as a child to make the distinction when to kiss somone for hello and goodbye and when not. It usually turned out to be this way: when I arrived in Croatia it took me almost a week to figure it out, and when I returned to Germany I had got used to it that much that I always found myself kissing complete strangers in completely inappropriate situations. ;)
— Sonja Tomaskovic Sep 27, 1:37pm # - Like a cul-de-sac of the mind, your personal remembrances will end with you unless you find the common ground of experience with your children. The arc of language will only suffice to set the trajectory, nothing but experience will bridge the gulf.
My solution: tell them what really mattered about your childhood – tell them about the love, the people (family, extended family) that they’re likely to meet, the places, and the “first times” for things; the rest will pale in the telling.
— GMR Sep 27, 7:00pm # - Write it down so it’ll be there for them when they’re ready for it. I wish I’d made my mom do that—there’s so much I wish I knew now.
— language hat Sep 28, 2:24pm # - Come on, Armstrong.
French rap isn’t that bad nowadays, is it?
When I was in high school there was MC Solar. Is he still popular?
I think I know some dumb and dirty jokes that translate well to bilingual teenagers. It’s probably best not to post them here….maybe I should SMS them straight to you children?
— amelia Sep 29, 12:31am # - MC Solar is still around, but then so is Johnny Hallyday.
I find my daughter chanting along to how tough it is to get by in the ghetto, then turn to me to say, ‘god, it’s just so true.’
Only kids find poverty romantic, and as long as it’s happening to somebody else.
— gail Sep 29, 2:32am # - Wow, I remember seeing Johnny Hallyday live in 1970 and thinking he was an hysterical Elvis imitator.
As for the ghetto worship, I have dircet evidence that they get over it. My high school journalism class is just publishing our first school paper of the year. Here’s some advice from a senior girl to the incoming freshman:
“Looking back on my freshman year I never remembered the ground being so close. I remember the pressure of trying to fit in; I had friends who got up at five o’clock every morning to apply layers of make-up, wore short skirts, and tried to date senior guys.
Many freshmen boys are an interesting breed of stupid. They walk around in pants that fall way beyond their butt, try to get any girl who has a pulse, and generally walk around with want-to-be-ghetto Phat Farm pants.
I’m here to give a little advice to all those freshman out there who obviously need a heads up on what’s acceptable here at Carmel High. We do not live in the ghetto, so dressing like you’re a preppy version of a gangster makes you look like a fool. Girls do not appreciate being treated like a piece of meat. We are not chicks. Do we look fuzzy and yellow? And yes, that’s a rhetorical question.
High School is full of new decisions and adventures, but seeing how short you can wear a skirt with or without flashing your entire student body is not exciting or dangerous.
I don’t understand the phenomenon of wearing shorter, tighter, smaller clothes. It seems as the years progress, every class is worse than the last. As a parting comment I would like to share a quote said about my freshman class…
“A big thanks to our freshmen class, for doing their part in this economic crisis by buying out our state supply of blonde hair dye, but the clothes vendors would like you to know that you are not confined to buying your clothes in the infant section.”
I think this applies to your class too.
__
Cute, eh? The rest is online at carmelhigh.org > school newspaper if you want a good laugh.
— susan bein (the mean miss bean) Sep 29, 7:37am # - It’s MC Solaar, bordel de putain de merde.
(This is how the formidable daughter would put it, right before Gail gives her a dirty look and I begin laughing very loudly)
— Dean Allen Sep 29, 11:42am # - French teenagers used a lot of “verslin” or l’invers or inverse or something else I can’t spell correctly.
My favorite was mechant becoming chant-me and pronounced shaw-may. It could be taken to extreme levels in conversation where every single word was reversed around the syllable. I even got a fax from a friend asking if my husband wore a vatcra tardcos.
Suit and tie.
This fad did not help my French. Sometimes when I spoke with regularadultFrench people I’d slip and say something very stupid and not just in l’invers. Like saying good-bye to my boyfriend’s parents just how I heard him say good-bye to his friends. “Salut-Bye-Quoi” What an idiot, eh?
Believe me, the teenager will not always be so formidable, but it sounds like she will always be a smart ass. And I say, thank goodness for little girls.
— amelia Oct 1, 3:06am # - Backwards slang is called verlan (backwards for “l’envers” which means backwards), and is still going strong.
So I too occasionally have to pause and rewind the tape of what some young punk in the know has just said, before understanding. By which point, I’ve missed the rest of their sentence. Oh well.
The UK’s rhyming slang, on the other hand, still leaves me utterly baffled.
— gail Oct 2, 5:16am # - How about this? I speak only English with my kids, so when they speak French, I can’t help the thought that they’re speaking it like me, i.e. as a foreign language. So I marvel at them getting the genders right (unlike me) and agreeing the past participle with preceding direct object (sorry to get tecky), when in fact they’re just speaking it like I speak English. Been there?
As for culture gap, send ‘em home! Earlier this year my elder son spent a week in UK with a friend (and even went to school with him there). No way he could imbibe a whole culture in such a short time, but it was still gratifying to hear him talk about the familiar (to me) situations—especially school—he experienced there for the first time and the expressions he picked up. And they stick: only yesterday he used one that my wife (French) hadn’t heard before. “Random person”, if you must know.
— Nick Oct 2, 12:45pm # - interesting, this kissing business. before i went to uni, i was totally alien to the concept of kissing ur friends. see, i had a uni mate, whose family had lived in England in their early years when the dad got transfered and so they developed this kissing thing from there. so she brought this kissing thing into the classroom, and we (only the gurls) caught on to it. so now, whenver we meet up, we kiss each other on both cheeks. but at home, no one does it much.
but the part where ur boy rubbed women’s asses and goin ‘mmm, nice’ cracked me up! lol…
— jennir Oct 3, 10:24pm #
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