You wouldn’t know that from watching this Rosetta Stone infomercial, where everyone seems to speak foreign languages perfectly with no effort. I turn it off and eventually fall asleep, which is the signal for the phlebotomist to show up to draw blood again, for only the seventh time today. I don’t mind too much, but my poor veins shrivel up and hide whenever Miss Transylvania walks in the door. Well, the veins had better get used to it. I’ve been told I’m going to be here awhile, at least several days, perhaps as much as a very long week, or until my heart returns to a normal rhythm.
“Courage,” the cardiologist says to me, patting me on the shoulder as he leaves the room during morning rounds. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard an American other than Dan Rather use that valediction.** I smile to myself, recalling the French taxi driver who’d good-naturedly wished us “Courage! ” when we told him we were from the States. Courage, one of those words the French use a lot (pronounced “cour-AHJ,” the accent on the second syllable), and in different ways, is from the French cœur, or “heart.” Thus courage means literally to “have heart,” a connection which, sadly, is totally lost in English. However, many of the heart-related idioms we have in our language—“heartbroken,” “bighearted,” “learn by heart,” “lionhearted”—have surprisingly close French equivalents, more so than with most idioms, which tend to be localized. The heart, it seems, is a special case. Mine in particular is real special.
Courage indeed. If I’m going to be imprisoned here for a week, shackled to intravenous drips and monitors, I’d best stop whining and make use of the time. After all, the Marquis de Sade didn’t spend twenty years moping about the indignity of confinement (and the lack of young girls and younger boys) while imprisoned in Vincennes; he wrote like mad.*** It occurs to me that for at least the next several days I have no job to go to, no appointments, and no obligations whatsoever. I don’t have to cook, and—the lazy man’s dream—I don’t even have to get out of bed to pee. (Which is a good thing, since with multiple IVs dripping into me I have to go about every twenty minutes—all that liquid has to go somewhere.) Why, I can spend all day and half the night studying French!
In theory. This bird fluttering inside my chest is a little distracting. Discussions of the difficulties baby boomers face in learning a language tend to center around our brains, ignoring the other eight-ninths of us that’s holding up that head. My heart troubles are not making things any easier, for sure, and I realize, as I lie in my hospital bed, that I’ve come to a crossroads, un carrefour. One path leads to, well, Carrefour, the French department store and supermarket chain; the other, to lots of free time and a free pass—the unassailable excuse that “I gave up French to focus on my health.”
Which road will I take? I’m still undecided when Anne asks, “Can I bring you anything from home? A book? Radio?”
I think for a moment. “My laptop and headset, the French-English dictionary on my desk, and maybe the collection of Sartre plays in French.”
Et puis, merde—screw it! I’m going to Carrefour.
COINCIDENTALLY, ROSETTA STONE, AS if it has been spying on me through the bushes, has moved on to emergency room vocabulary—“hospital,” “ambulance,” “broken,” “burned,” “wounded,” everything short of mort. This is considerate of them, but it means that there are a whole lot of more useful words we’ll never get to. Like “draft beer.” If I want to order a draft beer in Paris, I’m out of luck if relying on Rosetta Stone; linguistically, I’m better off showing up at a French hospital with a broken collarbone.
The most difficult part of French so far is remembering the new words. This is frustrating, especially considering that the typical child entering kindergarten has a vocabulary of fourteen thousand words. To put that into perspective, a child is learning a new word every two hours of every waking moment. Without trying. How does this almost magical acquisition of language happen? I’m killing myself trying to learn French; who taught me English?
UNTIL THE RENAISSANCE, LANGUAGE was thought to be bestowed on humankind by God, or the gods. The ancient Greeks credited Prometheus with bringing to earth not only fire but language as well, although as far back as the third century BC, Epicurus (whose writing credits include publishing the Western world’s first cookbook) argued that language is not the creation of a god, but rather a biological function akin to vision. Nevertheless, the view of language as something mystical, inexplicable, or God-given prevailed and may explain the comparatively late start of the science of linguistics. A book by the Swiss philosopher and linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, published shortly after his death in 1913, is considered to mark the inception of modern linguistics, putting the science of language a century or two behind the founding of biology, chemistry, and psychology—even half a century behind Darwin.
Into the mid-1800s, linguistics research and activity were focused mainly on vocabulary and on cataloging and translating newfound languages (helped in no small part by Bible societies, which provided the funding for researchers to go into remote areas, discover and learn an undocumented language, and translate the Bible into that language). If there was interest in the origin and nature of language, it was largely relegated to the realm of psychology—until 1957, that is, when what is still remembered as “the event” shook up the sleepy world of linguistics.
The event was the publication of Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at MIT. Chomsky’s book moved the discussion from vocabulary to syntax—that is, the fundamental rules of language—and raised an interesting question that, surprisingly, hadn’t been given a lot of thought until then: How is it that a young child, with limited cognitive development, can acquire such a complex, daunting skill as language? Especially considering that a toddler trying to make sense of the babble around him is surrounded not only by grammatically correct language but also by incorrect, incomplete, and garbled sentences (think of the Watergate tapes). Yet the child somehow learns the syntactic rules of language, that “John hit Mary” is not at all the same as the reversed “Mary hit John,” but that “John threw the ball to Mary” does mean the same as the reversed “John threw Mary the ball.” Language isn’t acquired from mere mimicry, Chomsky argued, or children wouldn’t say things like, “Tommy hitted me.”
Furthermore, language involves combining a finite set of words into an infinite set of combinations and meanings, and Chomsky wondered how children are able to develop a rule system, not only for the finite sentences they’ve heard, but also for the infinite variations of sentences they haven’t heard. Here’s an interesting thing about language: Take nearly any sentence on this page, and chances are that this is the first time it’s appeared in print. Ever. Yet I was able to effortlessly compose each sentence, almost without thinking. (Let me rephrase that—without thinking about syntax.)
This intrigued Chomsky. As did another question: How is it that all the languages of the world, even those that apparently have no common origin, have a common basic grammar, a similar set of rules for how language is constructed? Noam Chomsky’s answer to these mysteries of language, the theory that galvanized and divided the world of linguistics in 1957, is that humans are wired for language, are born with an innate ability to understand the basic rules of language: what Chomsky calls a universal grammar (UG), a “genetically determined . . . language acquisition device” in the human (and only the human) brain.
Chomsky’s theory was so divisive that the first question a linguist at a convention in the 1960s was likely to be asked was, “Are you pro-Chomsky or anti-Chomsky?” The detractors claimed that Chomsky was essentially trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist; that children learn language from the adults around them; and that the common syntax of the world’s languages can be explained by a single, common origin of the world’s tongues. Plus, they maintained, the theory falls apart when you look at primitive languages in parts of the world Chomsky didn’t probe. There were also objections that the sudden appearance o
f UG in humans defied the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Yet studies done by, among others, psycholinguists Elissa Newport and Jenny Singleton on deaf children who, even though they weren’t exposed to a proper syntax and grammar, “intuitively” used American Sign Language correctly, support Chomsky.
Fifty years after the publication of Syntactic Structures, Noam Chomsky’s controversial theories have become nearly universally accepted, as the focus of the research has moved from observational studies to the search for a human “language gene,” with some promising but as yet inconclusive results. So accepted is Chomsky’s work today that he is as much remembered for his left-of-center politics as for his groundbreaking linguistic theories. Yet his work continues to inspire and spark debate. At my son’s wedding reception recently, I found several of his former college classmates sequestered near the bar, engaged in vigorous debate on Chomsky’s universal grammar theories as they relate to computer languages. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
As for my own “event,” my heart returns to a normal rhythm on the fourth day—I know before the nurses do—and the following morning I go home. The first thing I do is take a long, hot shower, washing my greasy hair three times, scrubbing the smell of hospital off my skin, out of my nostrils. Then I make tea and stare out the window for a long time, watching a soft drizzle, taking comfort in something I used to take for granted: as the French say, lubb-dupp, lubb-dupp, lubb-dupp.
Lubb-dupp.
* Late-breaking news: the limit has just been lowered to seven hours, in a recent experiment by a Swedish team that confirmed the results of the earlier study. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they figure out a way to do this experiment in vitro.
** “Courage!” was Rather’s much-ridiculed evening news broadcast sign-off for one week in the 1980s.
*** I have no idea why I’m comparing myself to the Marquis de Sade. Must be an indication of my state of mind. Or the hospital food.
It’s Complicated
You can really feel you’re having breakfast in Paris without even making the trip.
—JULIA CHILD on making croissants
Warning: Do not attempt the activities described in this chapter if you have any of the following: joint or neck pain, bursitis, arthritis, a weak back, a weak stomach, a rough week, bad knees, bunions, an expanding waistline, or anything else to do for the rest of the day. Or tomorrow.
Our daughter, Katie, who has two semesters of college French under her belt (at least she learned from my mistake), is coming home for her winter break in a few days and is, I fear, expecting some serious Frenchiness out of her old man when she arrives. I’d better start cramming for my oral. After breakfast I spend some time with Fluenz French, which, because it doesn’t have a speech recognition engine like Rosetta Stone’s, requires you to type in all your responses, thereby putting the focus on written rather than spoken French. I find this laborious and exhausting, not to mention misdirected; I don’t expect to be doing a lot of writing in France.
Worse, the on-screen instructor who introduces each lesson in a seven-minute video has a stray lock of hair over one eye that’s driving both of us nuts. I’m helpless to do anything about it, but she keeps flipping it back with a little head toss, and I become more occupied with making bets as to when she’s next going to toss her head than with listening to what she’s saying. It’s looking as if Georgetown professor Heidi Byrnes was correct when she warned me about the paucity of self-instruction materials. Or perhaps the problem is just my attention span. Either way, there’s not much French going down, so after an hour I go down, to the kitchen, in search of a midmorning snack.
“There’s nothing to eat,” I say to Anne, sounding, I imagine, like a whining enfant.
“What did you want?”
“If we were in France, we’d be munching on croissants right now.”
“You want to go to France?”
“I want a croissant.”
“Make some.”
This from a woman who is intimidated making an omelette (we’ll use the French spelling in this book!). Having planted the seed of a dangerous idea in my head, Anne, as is her fashion, vanishes, her words hanging in the air like the smells wafting from a Parisian boulangerie. Make croissants? Interesting concept. Maybe the over-the-top Gallic nature of the activity will stimulate my inspirational French nerve receptors. And even if it doesn’t, I’ll still have croissants for Katie when she arrives, which with any luck will paper over how bad my French is after what is now six months of daily study.
Having grown up in the 1950s and 1960s, I don’t I think I even saw, much less ate, a croissant before going to France. The closest I came was on those special nights when my mom would sharply rap a cardboard cylinder of Pillsbury crescent rolls against the edge of the countertop, unroll and separate the triangular pieces of dough, and wrap them around hot dogs, transforming (or desecrating, depending on your point of view) the most iconic of French foods, the very symbol of the Continental breakfast, into a form of American pop food art that Andy Warhol surely would have approved of. Although I must say that the baked crescent dogs are not half-bad. A little greasy maybe. They’re not croissants, or even close to croissants, with or without the hot dog, but they’re not bad, and for years my kids wouldn’t dream of our having a party without serving bite-size crescent dogs as hors d’oeuvres (a French term meaning “outside the work,” originally an architectural term referring to an outbuilding until it was appropriated by chefs for its current use).
The true croissant, although nearly synonymous with France, was actually invented in Austria, where it was called a Kipferl—yet another reason to be learning French. Would you rather speak the language that says Kipferl or the one that says croissant, even if the correct pronunciation of the initial cr requires the placement of one’s own tongue into a region of the throat that you thought only Linda Lovelace knew about. Legends of the Kipferl’s origin abound. The most popular one is that it was created in 1683 by Viennese bakers who, up all night baking, heard the invading Ottomans tunneling under the city and gave the alarm. After the victory, they created a roll shaped into a crescent, invoking the Ottoman flag. A colorful tale, but it’s probably as true as the story that the baguette was inspired by Napoleon, who insisted his bakers create a loaf that could be strapped to his soldiers’ legs.
What is true is that an Austrian baker, August Zang, introduced the Kipferl to France when he opened a Viennese bakery in Paris around 1839. An instant sensation, its unique flakiness and butteriness the result of four dozen alternating layers of butter and dough, the roll became known as a croissant, the French word for “crescent,” which, by the way, explains the appetizing lunar event that happens every month between a new moon and a quarter moon, un croissant de lune. (Does “crescent moon” sound as crazily romantic to a Frenchman as croissant de lune sounds to an American? Somehow I doubt it, which is yet another reason to . . . you know.)
Although I’ve never made croissants or any other kind of viennoiserie (a yeast dough enriched with eggs, sugar, and milk), I’m an experienced amateur bread baker, so I figure, how hard can it be? I have all the ingredients—flour, butter, milk, egg, and yeast—in the house. And it certainly promises to be a more enjoyable way to spend a morning than figuring out when to use depuis and il y a to mean “for” and “since,” as in “I’ve been making croissants for seven hours now” and “It seems like forever since I started making these croissants.” And that is precisely what I’ll be saying in seven hours, in addition to some choice French swear words. But for now, I tune my Internet radio to a station broadcasting out of Aix-en-Provence, get my Julia Child down from the bookshelf, and go to work to the sounds of French chansons. The recipe, in case you want to try this at home:
JULIA CHILD’S CROISSANTS
(Adapted by William Alexander for the Twenty-First-Century Home)
1. La première heure: Mix flour, salt, yeast, milk, and water into a very tight (that’s bak
erspeak for dry) dough and work it until your fingers start to cramp up. Place in fridge to chill for two hours.
2. La troisième heure: Observe belatedly that Julia notes, “The minimum time required for making croissants is 11 to 12 hours.” Figure out how to cut a few corners while working up a sweat trying to roll out the dough, which has the consistency of Play-Doh and keeps springing back to its original shape. Take out your frustration on the butter: Julia instructs you to whack the cold butter repeatedly with a rolling pin, beating it into submission until it’s a rectangle that fits into the center of the dough (I never knew you could soften butter so quickly that way—good to remember). Note Julia’s warning to work quickly and keep dough and butter chilled at all times or risk greasy mess. When doorbell rings, frantically wash hands and run to find two Jehovah’s Witnesses who have all morning to discuss the matter of your saving. Explain it’s your croissants that need saving, take the literature, run back to kitchen, fold warming dough into thirds, and chill for thirty minutes. Roll out dough again, fold, and chill. Observe that rolling this dough is like trying to skin an antelope. A live one. Take two ibuprofen to ease pain in shoulder.
3. La quatrième heure: While dough is chilling, watch video of Julia Child making croissants. Her dough isn’t nearly as tight as mine, although by the end of kneading, she, too, is audibly out of breath. Note that she is assisted in her task by a rolling pin the size of a small birch tree. Picking up one of her smaller pins (that is, one about the size of mine), she mutters, “I don’t know why I ever bought this thing!” and tosses it into the garbage. I’ve always loved Julia Child, but at this moment I love her for a new reason that’s just occurred to me: Julia went to France and . . . became French! I can do this, I tell myself. If she could, I can. Julia is now panting heavily. She would never get on TV today, which tells you about the sad state of TV today.
Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart Page 6