Faisez-moi la grammaire

March 30, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“The French don't care what they do, as long as they pronounce it correctly.” The line is from “My Fair Lady,” by Lerner and Loewe, and I remembered it well on my first trip to France, when people kept pretending not to understand what I was saying. I’m sure I’ll never be able to get directions to Neuilly.
But it’s not just pronunciation that the French care about. Lerner should have added something about spelling and grammar.
In March, we have NCAA basketball. The French have the national dictée, a spelling challenge that millions of people take – and take seriously – but which only a handful do perfectly (because of all those damn accent marks probably).
We Americans have a friendly and accommodating view of language. When our highest elected official constantly contorts the English language, it’s a matter of amusement, not concern. If a French candidate blows the subjunctive, he may find his gaffe used as the entire text of an attack ad.
A friend lives in a Paris building that has one of those little cage elevators. If someone doesn’t close the door firmly, the elevator won’t move from that floor. A sign reminding tenants to be sure “que la porte est fermée” hadn’t been posted for more than a couple of hours before someone had corrected it: “que la porte est SOIT fermée.”
British author Anthony Burgess wrote of eating in a family restaurant in the countryside. When the waitress, the fourteen-year-old daughter, asked, “Et comme dessert?” Burgess answered, in French, “Fruits.”
“Des fruits,” she noted, correcting a man three times her age. In France, the customer is not always right, especially when he omits the partitive article.
Now there’s this.

(Update, April 2012.  Unfortunately, the original video has been replaced with this version which has been edited to report on the response to the original.)
At first, it looks like a typical, moderately sexy music video. She strokes the naked fesses of a statue and sings, “Faisez-moi l’amour.” But wait. Even I know that faisez is wrong. It should be “faites-moi l’amour.”
It turns out the video is a bit of viral marketing for a company, Bescherelle, that sells grammar books and other language materials (including dictées). The video is full of grammatical errors, and French youth rose to the challenge to find them all. In the first week or so after its release, it had taken second place on MySpace TV, a record number of “don’t miss” designations, and 18,000 downloads.
You can find lots of grammatical errors in US music videos, but that’s not why kids watch them.
(Full story here; corrected grammar in the video here.)

Maira Kalman

March27, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

My introcution to Maira Kalman was via Max, a dog and the protagonist of her first (?) book, Max Makes a Million.

Call me Max.
Max the dreamer.
Max the poet.
Max the dog.

My dream is to live in Paris.
To live in Paris and be a poet.

Then came Ooh-La-La (Max in Love) and Max in Hollywood, Baby. Even if you don’t have the excuse of a kid to read these to, you should read them.

At the Children’s Museum on 83rd Street I saw a wonderful exhibit or installation or whatever you call it based on her work.

She is best known, I expect, for the NewYorkistan map, a cover for the New Yorker magazine in December of 2001 – three months after 9/11, two months after the US invasion of Afghanistan, when we were struggling with the odd names of all those odd places.

Since January, she’s been doing a weekly piece for the New York Times. This week’s (“So Moved”) is about democracy in America, but you can’t write and draw about democracy in America without a hat tip to Democracy in America.

(Click on the image for a version large enough that you can read the print.)

If I Had a Hammer

March 27, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’ve commented before (here, for example) that the American tendency to define problems in moral terms leads us to come up not with solutions but with punishments. I realize that if all you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as though it’s a nail. But surely there must be a variety of approaches available, especially when we need to deal with kids. Yet under policies that go by names like “zero tolerance,” we empty the toolbox of everything else, and we wind up with the Supreme Court deciding whether it’s O.K. for school authorities to strip-search a 13-year-old girl because they think she might be carrying Advil.

Now we have this from yesterday’s New York Times. Investigators in the office of George Skumanick, DA for Wyoming County, PA, found a picture on a girl’s cell phone – a couple of girls age 13 or 14 at a slumber party. The picture shows them from the waist up, and they are wearing bras. One of the girls is Marissa Miller, now fifteen.

Mr. Skumanick said he considered the photo “provocative” enough to tell Marissa and the friend, Grace Kelly, that if they did not attend a 10-hour class dealing with pornography and sexual violence, he was considering filing a charge of sexual abuse of a minor against both girls. If convicted, they could serve time in prison and would probably have to register as sex offenders.

The Times story doesn’t say exactly how the investigators got their hands on this salacious photo. Presumably, a teacher confiscated the phone because a kid was using it in school. Then school officials looked through the stored photos on the phone (a sort of iStripSearch), found the picture of the bra-clad girls, and called the DA’s office.

Wyoming County is just north of Luzerne County, home of Wilkes-Barre, where a juvenile court judge was sending kids to for-profit juvenile jails for the slightest infractions. The judge was getting payoffs from the firm that ran the jail.

Unfortunately, the hammer-obsessed are not confined to Northeast Pennsylvania. At Scatterplot, Drek posted a not-so-uninteresting item about the way Sheboygan, Michigan responds to teen sex – two court cases involving consensual sex between a 17-year-old and a 14-year-old. Drek was concerned about the unequal treatment. The 17-year-old girl with the 14-year-old boyfriend faced up to nine months in jail. The 17-year-old-boy with the 14-year-old girlfriend faces 25 years in prison.

Do any other advanced countries rely on extreme criminal penalties to deal with consensual sex between teenagers? Even if it’s sex that most adults don’t approve of, isn’t there some less destructive way to deal with it?

Know Your Limits

March 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Just in case you haven’t seen this instructional video on gender roles that has been getting wide distribution on the Internets. It’s from Harry Enfield and Chums, a British TV show of the 1990s. I post it here without further comment.