Padma replied the other day in his rich, wonderful French to a message from me in my, well, less wonderful French. He expressed sympathy for Mrs. Snoutsworthy and me on how frustrating we must find it being pretty articulate in English and, well, less so in French. Not but what we don't "muddle through" or "nous demerder", as he put it, literally "unshit ourselves."
I get this reaction a lot from French people here who often generously comment on how well I speak French. To someone who really speaks well they would never make this comment. What they mean is that they are able finding it surprisingly easy to make out what I am trying to say even though they are making a serious effort not to wince at my uglier mistakes. It's the wincing that I dread and find so comical, the tightening at the corners of the eyes. I try to imagine what my level of diction would correspond to in English where one can detect highly subtle data like the region of origin, level of education, social class maybe, and all this to an utter nicety.
Back to shit. You can sometimes hear excremental vocabulary on public radio where it's far less a "gros mot", a "big" word than in English. A minister in the old Chirac government called an opponent's speech "emmerdant" (boring) and it got a smile or two on the evening news. Really polite people find euphemisms for merde! as an outburst word using "mardi" (Tuesday) or "mince" (thin) instead of the m word. It's not all that gross to say "ça me fait chier !" (that makes me shit, it's really irritating or obnoxious) and the participle "chiant" is frequent enough.
We've been having trouble lately getting our toilet to accept, you know, our contributions. Our friend Denis, who visited us and our primitive bathroom, was mortified at having to ask for help plungering down a merde opiniatre (stubborn turd). Mrs Snoutsworthy finally noticed a foul smell in the garden and Mr. Oblivious (me) noticed that the little square lookout, the "regarde" was overflowing with some none-too-lovely stuff that was then finding its way into the nearby storm drain rather than forming a more obvious Lake of Shame beside the house.
So I took myself down to the mairie even though it is to a private company that we pay a monthly fee for water and waste. (A privitization that I find particularly chiant since the company is owned by Martin Bouygue, a super-rich capitalist dude and best friend of the Berlusconi-like French president, Sarkozy). Going in for help was a wise decision since the mayor told me if I had picked up the phone and called the help number I might have connected with an operator in far-off Biarritz and waited months for service. Monsieur le maire was right on the ball and had a huge, high-tech pumper truck outside the kitchen window here within two hours.
The demerdificaiton crew was very active and competent. They found the cause of the blockage, tree roots, probably from our weeping willow. I didn't want to ask how big the holes were in the underground pipe. Not my business. It was a stubborn blockage and this kid with a stylish 12" long blond forelock jumped into the manhole, reeking of you know what, without hesitation. Plus the hole itself was formed around a smallish car tire. It was magic how he slipped in, his broad shoulders offsetting through the tire, and completely disappeared from view. I missed seeing how he extricated himself.
