[indiscriminate mumbling here]

I had all four of my wisdom teeth surgically extracted on Friday. Ouch.

My poor swollen jowls aren't too happy about speaking English, let alone French. As a matter of fact, I haven't even attempted to pronounce one word of French since Friday morning. I thought about it, but then decided that it would be disastrous to even try. Frenchies must just resort to sign language until the swelling goes down, because tensing the muscles around the lips to form such sounds as [y] and [u] is simply excruciating, not to mention trying to spread one's lips far enough to properly pronounce a sound like [i]. That's one good thing about English: it's an easily mumbled language. I can hold my cheeks in the same position and still manage to mumble a sentence that's somewhat intelligible. Maybe one of these days, I'll see someone come up to me on the metro and set a little card down on my seat. Instead of the card saying something to the effect of "I'm deaf and I sell pins for a living", it'll say "Take pity on me, I just had dental surgery and can't speak for the next two weeks. Your donation goes to feed my diet of chocolate mousse and flan." And I will gladly contribute to the cause.

Stuff This!

I have a cold.

It's not a bad cold, but just enough to give me a stuffy nose.

Do you know the first thing most people say to me when they find out I've got a stuffy nose? They say, "Your nose is stuffed? That must make it a lot easier to speak French!"

Do you remember how Peter, the disgruntled main character in Office Space felt when someone said, "Sounds like someone's got a case of the Mondays!"? That's how it makes me feel to hear people ask about how my stuffy nose improves my speaking abilities. It actually makes it much, much harder, seeing as four vowels and two rather important consonants in French are made using the nose as the sole point of egress for the air. I understand that most people who say this to me are trying to be funny or trying to incite me into a rant. They think it's funny to imply that French people are stuffy snobs, so that if a Frenchman has a stuffy nose, he can actually speak better than normal.

I blow my nose in your general direction.

Voix Box

I am in love with the recorded voice of France Télécom.

That sounds odd, even to me, and I know exactly what it was supposed to mean. Allow me to clarify:

I love the way the automated female voice of France Télécom pronounces certain words. During my initial days in France, I made many bad phone calls before finally mastering the art of the cabine téléphonique and the mobicarte, so I had many one-sided conversations with said voice. Mme. Télécom is unusually expressive and cheerful when compared to the average Frenchwoman. A normal Frenchwoman would never be that gregarious with someone she had never met, let alone never seen. I guess I found the voice comforting when faced with the jarring experience of French public behavior. (That will be a topic for a future post.)

By far, my favorite word is "cinq". There's such a satisfying, deep resonance to it; I catch myself trying to replicate its delicious, full-bodied tone when I'm alone in the bathroom or in my office at work. Even better than cinq is cinquante-cinq, for obvious reasons.

I also love the voice of the little French boy who dubs Roo's voice (in French, he's Petit Gourou) in the Winnie the Pooh (Winnie l'Ourson) series. I was watching an episode on DVD several months ago with one of my little students, and I became very attached to the way Petit Gourou said "quatre". What made it even better was that it happened to be an episode about counting, so I got to hear it over and over again. And, just as before with Mme. Télécom, there was a quality to the pronunciation that I just found irresistible. I tried to imitate it to no avail.

The way these actors pronounce their numbers fascinates me; they just have such a satisfying pronunciation that it makes me feel as if I've personally been pronouncing everything totally wrong for the last 10 years. Does that make me a masochist for listening to these voices over and over, knowing full well that I will only torture myself trying to imitate them later?

Well, there you have it: the guilty pleasures of a disgruntled francophile. I can only dream of someday becoming as great at counting in French as Mme. Télécom and Petit Gourou. Yes, I realize I'm pathetic; no need to remind me.