Pulling a sickie in Quebec and France

I was reminded of the delightful colloquial French for “se déclarer malade, souvent pour échapper à une corvée” by its use in Libération. Cécilia Sarkozy, clearly a loose cannon (that may look like a deliberate and even sexist pun on “loose” in English and on “canon” in French, but any secondary meanings are unintentional, honest), was unavailable for a hamburger lunch with George Bush but recovered swiftly in order to go shopping. Libé, 14th August: “en se faisant porter pâle chez les Bush, la première dame s’écarte encore du protocole et intrigue.”

“Se faire porter pâle” = to chuck a sickie (if you’re Australian), and “to pull/take a sickie” if British. According to Jonathon Green’s Cassell Dictionary of Slang it’s of Australian origin and dates back to the 1950s, whereas Partridge agrees about the Australian origin but goes as far back as 1930.

The standard English “to call in sick” (= se faire porter malade/se déclarer malade/téléphoner pour prévenir/dire qu’on est malade) has led to the creation of the Québecois “caller malade”, as in the recently-heard “ma collègue avait callé malade” from a Francophone Canadian.

“Un canon”, by the way, is at the same time a sexist and admiring term for “une belle femme, aux formes épanouies” (Larousse Dictionnaire de l’argot), in case you were wondering about my earlier apology for the unintentional pun. “A babe” or “a stunner” would therefore be an appropriate tabloid-speak translation.
 

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Gaullist vocabulary

To my shame, only this week did I learn that de Gaulle was the first to use “l’Hexagone” for “La France”, in 1934 in Vers l’armée de métier. It has become such a cliché of political vocabulary that the hoary old gag about “les quatre coins de l’Hexagone” is even in the pages of the Grand Robert, tagged as “plais”. What’s interesting now is the journalistic use of the adjective “hexagonal” for “français” or “de la France”; I saw Diam’s French tour this year described in Le Monde as “sa tournée hexagonale”.
 

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Distinctly non-Gaullist vocabulary

Going back to “bavard” (see last month’s column) as a colloquial term for a lawyer, in a happy bit of serendipity I found the following when reading James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential in both languages at once: “His attorney is a grandstanding shyster only interested in getting his client out of...” becomes, in Freddy Michalski’s vivid virtuosic translation “Son avocat, c’est un bavard de premier plan qui s’intéresse uniquement à faire sortir son client de...”. You might justifiably quibble about the translation of “grandstanding”, mind; a “grandstanding” lawyer is one “qui joue pour la galerie”, who goes in for “des effets de manche”, “qui ne cherche qu’à épater l’auditoire”.

Michalski has translated not only a staggering number of “polars” but also a brave and very successful translation of William McIlvanney’s Docherty, mentioned in a previous column. That was back in February 2005, if you have by any chance saved it somewhere. You can go back as far as January 2006 under “Choose another column”, above.

As promised last month, I diligently re-watched several episodes of the subtitled version of Engrenages, but didn’t come upon anything other than “bavard” or “baveux” for “brief”. Any suggestions or finds very welcome, as always.
 

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Is it just me... ?

Am I the only one who is convinced that the French “paradis fiscal” as the translation for “tax haven” is based on a mishearing of someone frightfully posh? In what kind of English accent does “heaven” sound like “haven”? Not mine.
 

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Crows, geese, ravens and birds

Reminded of idiosyncratic differences between the two languages by things seen in the Nouvel Obs : in its “Cent lieux qui ont fait la France” (July 26th) you can read “A vol d’oiseau, Clichy-sous-Bois n’est pas bien loin du Stade de France”. “As the crow flies” in English, but just a vague “bird” in French.

Then, by a weird coincidence, in the following edition of the Nouvel Obs, more “bird” expressions, just nine pages apart. Someone’s wife is quoted as having said to a forty year-old “tu t’es vu avec tes pattes d’oie..?”, “have you seen what you look like with your crow’s feet?” in English, but “goose’s feet” in French.

Nine pages earlier, predictably, in connection with the Clearstream Affair, there is mention of “Jean-Louis Gregorin, ‘le corbeau’, celui qui a transmis les faux listings à la justice.” What I’m trying to find at the moment is a pre-WWII citation for “corbeau” as “a writer of poison-pen/anonymous letters” or “writer of letters to the authorities or police informing on someone”. How much does it pre-date Clouzot’s 1943 film Le Corbeau? Alain Rey, in Le Grand Robert, dates it as 20th-century in this sense; no more precise than that. The Trésor de la langue française gives no date at all. The TLF remains a marvellous free on-line resource, though, at http://atilf.atilf.fr/. The other main 19th-century colloquial meanings of “corbeau” are terms for priests or undertakers, because of their black work-clothes, and now “corbeaux” is also a modern colloquial word for “Goths” or “les gothiques”, also because of their black uniform.

As for the difference between a crow and a raven... Clouzot’s film title was translated as The Raven, but a “raven” is not a poison-pen letter-writer in English, more of a harbinger of doom. Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven is Le Corbeau in Baudelaire’s translation. Mallarmé too translated it by Le Corbeau.

The OED says a raven is “a large black bird of the crow family”, and bilingual dictionaries traditionally give “une corneille” for “a crow” and “un (grand) corbeau” for “a raven”. That parenthetical “grand” might finally allow me to tell crows and ravens apart now. The ravens at the Tower of London are “les corbeaux de la Tour de Londres”. Look up “une corneille” in the Grand Robert and you find “oiseau du genre Corvus, plus petit que le grand corbeau, à queue arrondie et plumage terne”, which helps a little. Also “corbeau”, the generic term, is part of the precise and specific names for a rook (“corbeau freux”), a raven (“un grand corbeau”) and a crow (“un corbeau corneille”). Allez, trêve de noms d'oiseaux!
 
Dougal Campbell, French language tutor at Glasgow University
 
 
Please contact the author with any comments and similar amuse-gueule snippets of French, at D.Campbell@french.arts.gla.ac.uk

[Copyright Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd 2007]