Entrez vous...the polite form.

For those of you who speak French better than me, perhaps a little explanation as to the title of my blog is in order. I learned early on in my life in Geneva that French is a far more formal language than English. Even my most verbose and flowery attempts in my native English will never reach the heights of basic French emails. Where anglophones say "Please write this memo by 5pm," in French, one must say something to the effect of "My dearest madam, how are you today? And your husband? And children? And did you have a lovely holiday last month? I hope it is no trouble, but if there is any possibilty of your availability despite the fresh air and shining sun outside we find today, would you please consider drafting a memo which is likely to be shorter than this request anyways and if you happen to find yourself with sufficient time would you get it to me by 5pm assuming this is acceptable to you and it in no way is an inconvenience you or your husband or your children or your children's children. Yours very faithfully until the end of time."

Ok, so I exaggerate, but this is anyways the impression I got after a few short months here. Usually the expectation of flowery language is most common among postal agents, cantonal (city) officials and other bureaucratic agents who make it their business to make expatriates suffer the humiliation of explaining their problems in broken French and become very cranky if the polite "vous" form is forgotten or if a "s'il vous plait" goes missing. Really, when I'm trying to arrange for a residence permit so that I don't get deported back to the wild west that the Swiss imagine Texas to be, they should be grateful if I get any "vous"s in between my "ya'lls" and "yeehaws".

Being from Texas, most of my foreign language skills come from watching too many telenovelas and ordering Mexican food. Unfortunately, this means that what little French I knew before moving to Geneva consisted of the occasional Hollywood film set in Paris, more often than not featuring an American playing a French speaker (think Kevin Kline in French Kiss). So if I ever throw out a French phrase with great confidence and it turns out to mean jack squat in French, you know the reason.

Recently, I heard a knock at my office door. While normally my bosses just burst in the office without a care (which makes internet surfing difficult, let me tell you), this time, the responsible knocker seemed intent on waiting for me to verbally permit entry. Now knowing that a vast majority of possible intruders would be French speaking, and unsure exactly who might be lurking behind the half-closed door, I tentatively replied "entrez vous."

The laughter was instantaneous. As a francophone friend of mine opened the door the rest of the way already doubled over in hysterical laughter, my Canadian office mate (the Canadians serving as the perpetual link/translation service between the francophones and anglophones at the ICRC) kindly explained to me that entrez was the vous command, and that as it was not reflexive, did not need the vous. Basically I had said "Enter you you". There is now a sign on our door that says "Entrez vous" and the story is oft-repeated amongst my coworkers, but for the most part I think they were glad that I was at least attempting to use the polite form.

French lesson #1: Just because French has a polite verb form and English does not, does NOT mean that French speakers won't laugh in your face. Polite verbs do not polite people make.

Today marks my 2nd year of living in Geneva, Switzerland. That's two years of no grocery shopping on Sundays, two years of taking a bus into France just to be able to afford meat, and more particularly, two years of trying to pick up French in a city where everyone knows English but everyone insists on speaking French.

Now don't get me wrong, j'aime bien le français, but les francophones don't make it easy for me. Granted, I am a Texan lawyer working on humanitarian law issues at a heavily French-speaking organization that only hired Swiss employees for the first century or so of its existence, so I am well aware of the cultural disruption I must cause on a daily basis. Even if I was not aware, of course, I am certainly reminded twenty times a day of the fact (that many of my coworkers must incessantly worry that I forget) that I am 1) American, 2) Texan, 3) Anglophone, 4) not French-speaking (the distinction between 3 & 4 I must make on behalf of my beloved Canadian friends who may be anglophone but yet have mastered Napoleon's mother tongue).

As anglophones are very much in the minority (and the ICRC is as wary of Americans as Switzerland is of wars and minarets), I have learned to grin and bare the jokes about my French (and my nationality), but I decided to write this blog in order to take out a little of my frustration. Enjoy...et entrez vous.