Back to the bises

In a previous article I gave my impressions of the French custom of exchanging cheek kisses aka faire la bise. (Last time I said faire les bises, but one of my colleagues corrected me), so I’ll trust him and just know that French is a difficult language with a lot of things that seem to make little sense [plus I couldn't find any good examples in the TLFi]. So even though I have never seen French people just do one bise, I will use the “locution verbale” faire la bise (au singulier, même s’il y a en fait plusieurs bises) when referring to this French custom.

Status update your bises

So as I have mentioned before with French culture sometimes people with whom you interact may change their behavior towards you. This could be just a special occasion occurrence and you shouldn’t count on it happening again. Or… you may have being upgraded to someone who deserves a bise.

Biseworthy

I must take this time to retract some of my prior statements concerning who is biseworthy. I had stated that you don’t faire la bise with your marchand de journaux, apparently, if this evening is any indication, I was wrong.That’s right folks, my newsvendor bised me.

I am not exactly sure how I went from mere magazine buyer to bisable, but it has definitely been an interesting relationship to watch evolve. I am not sure of every detail but the evolution went something like this:

The Daring Tutoyement

I sometimes like to play it fast and loose with my use of the tutoiement in French, most often I don’t do it on purpose. To me the vouvoiement takes a conscient effort on my behalf and I often slip up and just spout out whatever you happens to slide off of my tongue. More often than not it is just tu. Especially when one has acquired the habit of using the “marqueur discursif” tu vois? at the end of certain utterances then gets mocked while making a sentence worthy of the Little Prince English to French translation.

Yeah folks, that’s right, Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote that book in English. I don’t even think that he is the one who actually translated it into French, unlike Samuel Beckett, who first wrote En attendant Godot in French then insisted upon translating it himself into English, his native tongue.

If you didn’t catch that, it meant I was using the vous and tu forms in the same sentence. So needless to say to, I tutoyed my marchand one day. I think he liked it.

The small talk

From then on we were 2toyin’ each other  like we were old school chums. Anyways, since he seemed to be a nice enough guy and as it turns out shares a similar education background as me, I would wave at him or chat with him a bit as I bought my magazines. Sometimes I didn’t even buy anything, I just asked him how things were.

The theory shattering bise

Today it came, the bise that made me re-examine my preconceived notions about fairing la bise. Why shouldn’t you give the people the bise that you see most often in your everyday life and with whom you enjoy nice conversations? If it happens that it is your marchard de journaux, don’t bise a snob.

Don’t engage the bise

Well, that may have left some of you wondering when you should approach someone for the bise. My best advice - let them come to you.  Some of you may know the word laisser faire in English (borrowed bien sûr, from French) in the economic or governmental sense of the term, I adopt its other meaning, “noninterference in the affairs of others”. Basically, je laisse faire.

Voilà, hope you learned some interesting things about “French kisses” (in the cheeky sense). I know I did.

TUTOYER, verbe trans. [tytwaje]

« s’adresser à quelqu’un en lui disant tu. »

• (to address someone using tu)

VOUVOYER, verbe trans. [vuvwaje]

« s’adresser à quelqu’un en employant par politesse vous à la place de tu. »
• (to address someone using vous in place of tu)

[As always my initial instinct leads me to the TLFi to provide you with this information, and of course I must give credit where credit it due. I have, however, modified the organization of the article and replaced the parentheses surrounding the word tu in the definition by italics to harmonize with the TLFi’s use of italics in the article vouvoyer.]

2 French Words • 2 Foreign Concepts

Growing up speaking English and then trying to learn French as an adolescent makes it really difficult to really grasp all of the nuances and subtilities of when to use vous and when to use tu when addressing someone. So if you have some basic knowledge of languages like Spanish or French etc. ; you may be aware that there is more than one form of the pronoun you. So as you may have learned the French word tu is the more familiar you and vous is the formal you. This is where the subtilities come into play. (I’ll come back to this aspect of the tu/vous paradigme in a bit.)

Uses of vous (from easiest to most difficult [in my opinion]) :

1st use of vous –second person plural pronoun

To sum it up, in French there is a plural you – vous ; okay that is cool. I can understand the utility of having a plural you pronoun. In American English we can even observe that often speakers will use terms such as you guys, you all, ya’ll when refering to a plural you. One of the easiest instances in which you can use the vous form is, for example, if you are speaking to 2 friends at once, even though individual you may use tu with them. ( I remember the first time I spoke to 2 French girls at once and felt so stupid looking at them and saying vous, so I kept making sure that I looked back and forth at each of them a lot to make sure they knew that I was « vouvoying » them as an entity and that I didn’t just mess up and use the wrong form [which I have been known to do on an inopportune occassion]).

2nd use of vous –vouvoiement of cultural respect

As you may have learned in school, according to the norms of French in France, you should « vouvoie » your elders. Well that is easy if they are 80 years old. But so what do you do if you don’t want to offend someone be showing them that you are presuming that they are older than you ? ( What ? We’re not the same age ? Oh, but you look so young and cool.)

So I have decided to make you a list of people who are almost certain to be requiring you to expend some extra breath conjugating out extra syllables needed to agree your verb with the vous subject. And if time is money, and it takes more time to pronounce the same sentence with a vous than a tu, why not « tutoyer plus pour gagner plus » ?

People you probably ought to « vouvoie » (from most obvious to least obvious) :

• Government officials etc.
• Senior citizens
• Person interviewing you for a job
• Your teachers and professors
• Your boss (sometimes ? maybe ? depending on which one ? – You see it’s confusing)
• Servers
• Basically anybody you don’t really know (if you want to be respectful)

So when is it okay to « tutoie » somebody ?

Well, if you want to follow the French customs, you may start out by « vouvoying » somebody. Then at some point they may say something like, « on peut se tutoyer peut-être », or « tu peux me tutoyer », meaning « maybe we could tutoie each other », or « you can tutoie me ». (Apparently unbeknownst to me, yet knownst to others and hilarious for a French person, this « relationship update in your status » also implies that you shouldn’t be writing out things like :

• Monsieur Nom de Famille,
• Je voudrais savoir à quelle heure tu m’attends pour la réunion. […]
• Mr. Familyname,
• I would like to know at what time you(tu) expect me for the meeting.[…]).

So can I only tutoie someone if they tell me it’s okay ?

Absolutely not. Certain people, to whom I will refer as racailles « hoodlums », find it totally acceptable to confront others (me) with interactions like this one :

• Racaille : « Ey. T’as pas une clope ?! »
• Me : « Eh, non. »
• Racaille : « Salope. »
• [Basically,] « hey don’t ya got a smoke ? »
• « Um, no. » (I respond, while hurrying past)
• « Slut ».

So if you are trying to fit in with the racailles, you can just tutoie everyone. It depends which parts of French culture interest you.

So are the racailles the only ones that can just start off by tutoying people they meet for the first time ?

Heck, no. If you are Québecois, you already have a good excuse. The use of the tu instead of vous is more common than in France. (Maybe because they are more overt and initially friendly that the majority of the Parisian population I come across every day). If you are not Québecois but would like to pretend to be, or just brush up on your accent and learn French regional expressions in Québec I recommend the

têtes à claques.

Who am I sure to be able to tutoie ?

Well nobody is perfect and we all are bound to make mistakes here and there, I am pretty certain that most French people would say that this list would be a safe bet :

• Dogs
• Cats
• Babies
• That mean racaille that called you a slut for not having a cigarette

Hopefully that clears some of the initial confusion up. For more interesting tidbits of information on the French language and culture as experienced by an American in Paris, sign up for my RSS feed (but just use a compliant browser like the lastest version of Firefox for instance).

eau de toilette • [odətwalεt] n.f.

My friend asked me the other day why the French make their perfume with toilet water. Hmm. Well, first of all, they don’t. This is  a misconception due to the fact that she was thinking of the most common sense of the word toilet in Amercian English ; « bathroom fixture consisting of a bowl, usually with a hinged seat and lid, with flushing water, used for defecation and urination ».

But doesn’t the French word toilette also share the same meaning ?

Yes. The French language  also has more than one meaning for their word toilette. It is a polysemic word, which can often lead to misunderstandings, (especially when you don’t know all of the possible meanings of a word and misuse one casually in a conversation : but more on that later…).

So if it doesn’t come from a toilet, where does it come from ?

Well, it basically comes from toile « sort of woven cloth » + the diminutive suffix –ette. Hence, toilette « little woven cloth ».

How did a little cloth turn into my perfume ?

Semantic Evolution, my dear Watson. So in France around 1352 toilette was used to refer to the cloth used to wrap up clothes. And then in 1599 the word was used to refer to the piece of cloth on which they would lay out on a table or desk type piece of furniture, the ensemble of objects that they need to wash and get ready . Next in around 1661 through the process of metonymy the word toilette started refering  to the ensemble objects laying out on the « piece of little cloth ». (Obviously the semantic evolution of the French word toilette doesn’t stop here, otherwise we wouldn’t be refering to bathroom fixtures in either English or French as toilets/toilettes. But for my purposes that is probably far enough).

Eau de Toilette = Water of the ensemble of objects used to prepare oneself  laid out on a small piece of cloth.

So my friend, this is essentially what the words eau de toilette printed on your perfume bottle mean. And since the French language is chic and they can make the word toilette sound cool by saying things like faire sa toilette « prepare oneself », plus the litteral English translation was to long for the bottle. (Just kidding that would actually be more like eau de toilette sur toilette). The best translation would be more like water for getting ready.

Unfortunately the TLFi, one of the  greatest French dictionaries ever, has not yet included an article for the « locution nominal » eau de toilette,  but, it does appear in the citations in 7 other  articles (lavande « lavander » ; bidet ; dentifrice « toothpaste » ; entêter, fraîcheur « freshness » ; pilote « pilot » ; and interestingly enough suffocation. Upon an initial scan of the TLFi’s current citations the first attestation (at least amoung their references at this time) of eau de toilette appears to be in (ZOLA, Nana, 1880, p. 1206) « Dans le couloir, la suffocation augmentait encore; des aigreurs d’eau de toilette, des parfums de savons, l’empoisonnement des haleines ». I would be willing to go so far as to imagine that in France sometime between 1661 and 1880 eau de toilette made its  way into the French culture…and eventually into American culture as well.

The New Oxford American Dictionary contains an article for the noun eau de toilette ; their definition, « a dilute form of perfume ; toilet water ». Their etymology claims it comes from early 20th century French litterally ‘toilet-water’. »  Well it is no wonder my friend is confused if even the dictionaries like the Oxford is not explaining to which sense of toilet they’re refering.

In case you didn’t know (I hadn’t),  apparently the English language had also borrowed from the French  the sense « act or process of dressing and grooming oneself » of the word toilet. Knowing how most Americans are when it comes to talking about toilets (calling the rooms where you find them a bathroom or a restroom, the ladies room, the powder room etc.), I imagine that there are not a whole lot of people that going around using the word toilet when they say they are getting ready. Which is probably why quite a few people only think about bathroom fixture when they read those words eau de toilette on their perfume bottle.

bise • [bi:z] n.f.

Fam. “baiser” • “kiss” - Faire les bises • “(litterally) to make kisses”

1^ère attest. 1911 supra; déverbal de biser* « baiser ». [Source : TLFi]

What are these bises and what does it all mean?

As you may know in French culture people often kiss each other on the cheeks. So if you are in France and interact with some French people, you may be faced with this custom

When should one faire les bises • [fεRlebi:z] ?

Obviously you don’t go around “fairing les bises” with just anyone. Here are examples of people with whom you don’t need to faire les bises:

• taxi drivers
• le marchand de journaux • “news vendor”
• le boulanger • “bread vendor”
• etc.

So now that you know from whom you should not be receving any bises, here are examples of people with whom you may need to faire les bises:

• your friends
• friends of your friends
• family of your friends
• certain collegues*

Basics of les bises

Now that you know what these bises are and with whom you are expected to do them, how do you engage in this custom?

How many bises?

There is no specific rule and the number of bises may vary from region to region and person to person. The best bet is to try for 2, then sort of pull away to see if they are going for more. If you pull away too far the common response you may here will be, “c’est x chez moi” (x being the number of kisses to which they are accustomed). Normally they will say 3 or 4, so I like to say things like “c’est 18 chez moi” (it’s 18 where I’m from).

To bise or not to bise? That is the question.

Once again, as unfortunately I have come to learn, there is not a “Big Book of Bising” or a “Bising 101” class. Basically if someone starts giving you the bises on a regular basis, then you should do likewise. A common courtesy is to not faire les bises when you are sick.

Some bising is only circumstancial.

You may encounter certain times when someone with whom you do not normally faire les bises, bises you. What do you do? The important thing to remember is that there are certain cases which call for a bise. Normally when you receive a gift, you go around and faire les bises with everybody that offered it. This doesn’t mean that the next time you see that person that they will want to faire les bises with you.

The whole custom of fairing les bises is really confusing and can make you read too much into stuff if misunderstood or misused. My advice, just play follow the leader. Just let the people come to kiss you, and copy what they do.