“I love your blog. It’s terrible”. This comment was left on my daughter’s blog. I’d hate to think what the comment would be if she didn’t like the blog!
Un restaurant terrible dans la rue Montorgueil
The reader making the comment is French of course and not aware that terrible is something negative in English. Like formidable. Telling someone they are formidable in French means they’re great whereas in English it’s means you wouldn’t like to get on their wrong side. Hardly the same, is it? In French you’d say redoutable or even terrible.
Il est terrible can mean that he’s fantastic or awful depending on the context. That makes it easy to remember, doesn’t it?
Although terrible comes from the Latin terribilis which in turn comes from terrere, to frighten, it now has several meanings in French:
1. Inspiring terror or fear e.g. Une terrible catastrophe
2. Reaching a violent or considerable force e.g. Il s’est produit une terrible secousse – There was a terrible earthquake
3. Very unpleasant e.g. Il a un caractère terrible – He has an awful character
4. Representing a large quantity e.g. J’ai un travail terrible à faire – I’ve got an enormous amount of work to do
5. And more familiarly, out of the ordinary, inspiring admiration or surprise e.g. Il est arrivé avec une fille terrible – He turned up with a terrific girl.
And there you have it – the English version of terrible meaning something positive, namely terrific, which is usually positive in English, except for expressions such as “There was a terrific storm”.
Un autre restaurant dans la rue Montorgueil qui a l’air terrible
Formidable, which comes from the Latin formidabilis, which in turn comes from formido, dread or terror, has kept its original meaning in English, whereas as its meaning in French is always positive, whether the idea is colossal or imposing e.g. Une volonté formidable – Incredible determination, inspiring admiration e.g. un type formidable – a terrific person, or something astonishing e.g. C’est quand même formidable qu’il ne vous ait rien dit – It’s really astonishing that he did say anything to you.
So if someone tells you about un restaurant terrible, you can add it to your list of places to go!
When you grow up in Australia, you know all about Venetian blinds. They are not nearly as popular in France and most people don’t know how to use them. We had them at the French university where I taught and I began each year with a lesson on how to open and close them! However, I had never really thought about the name until we got to Venice where our home exchange/rental flat had two sets that didn’t close properly.
Typical Venetian shutters withVenetian blinds on the right
Our French guide book, Le Routard, mentioned them, giving persiennes as a translation which is rather strange because persiennes are something quite different. They are what I call louvres, which is a funny word when you come to think about it as it comes from the French word open.
Louvres and modern Venetian blinds on the Rialto Bridge
Obviously modern Venetian blinds are adaptations of the original ones. I checked out the windows in Venice but they mostly seemed to have wooden shutters or curtains with only a few Venetians on some older buildings. I found some slatted shutters or louvres on the Rialto bridge but they are hardly what I’d call a Venetian blind.
These shutters in Venice would be called persiennes in French
In fact, Venetian blind turns out to be very nebulous terminology and seems to cover various types of blinds, made of different materials (wood, metal, plastic) and consisting of horizontal overlapping slats held together with a cord so they can be rotated open or closed.
Fairly old Venetian blinds and shutters
The generic term for blind in French is store which comes from the Italian stora, meaning mat. It also includes the sort of awnings you have in front of a shop or café in France. Like a blind, a store can be solid or have slats.
Those metal and glass awnings over front doors are called marquises by the way, which I think is a lovely term but I have no idea where it comes from.
A marquise over a front door
Back to our blinds. Persiennes are mostly wooden but can also be metal with horiziontal and occasionally vertical overlapping slats that are fixed. They can be opened in several ways – outwards or upwards like a window, by sliding across, etc.
Un store de restaurant avec des persiennes aux fenêtres
Some persiennes are a type of shutter or volet. A volet can also be solid and is defined as a covering over a window to block out the light from either the inside or outside. Most French houses have them and most French people prefer to sleep in almost total darkness.
This was very strange to me when I first moved to France as we only had Venetian blinds in our house and they weren’t necessarily closed. They certainly didn’t block out all the light. Once I got used to sleeping with shutters, I found it very difficult not to have them. Our flat in Paris only has roller blinds so I had curtains made with special light-blocking lining.
Our folding inside shutters
Our house in Blois has shutters that open and close inside and guarantee total darkness. A recent Australian visitor loved them – she said it was like sleeping in a cave!
A thought has just struck me – what is the Italian meaning of Venetian blinds is not our Venitian blinds at all, but the French persiennes? I hope someone will be able to answer me!
You’d seriously think that something as simple as a window would have a direct correspondence in French, now wouldn’t you ? Well, it doesn’t . The English word “window” has a much wider connotation than the French fenêtre.
Je regarde par ma fenêtre à croisillons
The comparison starts off simply enough. J’ai regardé par la fenêtre = I looked out the window. Mon appartement a cinq fenêtres = My apartment has five windows. Its when you start getting more specific that it gets more complicated.
The house has a big window overlooking the sea = la maison a une grande baie vitrée qui donne sur la mer. Baie actually means an opening in a wall, a door or a window, and vitré is the adjective from vitre = glass. Fenêtre in fact is generally used to mean the window frame even though the technical word chassis exists.
In English you would say, “I cleaned the windows” but in French you’d say j’ai nettoyé les vitres or even j’ai nettoyé les carreaux (since a lot of window panes are square) and not j’ai lavé les fenêtres. A window with a lot of little panes is a fenêtre à petits carreaux.
Whereas we would say “his ball broke the window”, in French you would say il a cassé la vitre avec sa balle. Verre can be used but it’s not the correct term.
Avec toutes ces fenêtres, le château de Beauregard est très vitré. Beaucoup de fenêtres à meneaux.
A reader drew my attention to the use of vitré meaning a large number of windows in a TV programme about the Château de Champs sur Marne. La maison est très vitrée, même archi-vitrée. This is not the way the word is usually used and conveys the idea of a large amount of glass.
You would never use fenêtre to describe a large window that doesn’t open. It’s a baie vitrée as above. Note that our bay window is protruding where as baie vitrée is not. The French use the English term bay-window or fenêtre en saillie.
Une belle vitrine et porte vitrée pour faire du lèche vitrine dans la gallérie du Palais Royal
A really big glass window is called a verrière while a shop window is called a vitrine, with lèche-vitrine (lécher = lick) meaning window shopping! A ticket window in a train station, for example, is a guichet and the same word is used for ticket counter.
A stained glass or leadlight window is a vitrail in French (plural vitraux) with no distinction between the two in French. Leadlight could actually be used for both in English but stained glass is used traditionally for ornate windows and leadlight for windows of domestic and commercial architecture that are generally simpler.
Notre petit vitrail avec son cabochon de la cathédral de Chartres
One of the most surprising words connected with fenêtre that I know is défenestration. The first time I heard il s’est défenestré du sixième étage on the radio, I had no idea what it meant. I’ve heard it many times since. They never say “he jumped out the window” or “threw himself out the window” but always use the verb défenestrer.
Here are a few other windows to finish off :
fenêtre à guillotine = sash window (typically French, huh?)
fenêtre à battants/à meneau = casement/mullioned window
I wrote a short post last week about travaux so I thought I should talk about travail today. You may remember that travail comes from the low Latin trepalium, instrument of torture, derived from the Latin tres, three, and palus, stake.
En plein travail intellectuel
I was about to give travaux scientifiques and travaux manuels as examples of travaux when I realised that you can also say travail scientifique and travail manuel and it doesn’t quite mean the same thing, even though the translation is often the same. In fact, travaux scientifiques – scientific work – are often the product of travail scientifique – also scientific work! But the line between them can be very fine.
C’est un travail scientifique original = It’s an original scientific work
Il vient de publier les résultats de ses travaux scientifiques. = He’s just published the results of his scientific work.
Il a fait un travail scientifique extraordinaire = The scientific work he carried out was extraordinary (though this can be translated in many different ways depending on the context).
The distinction between travail manuel and travaux manuels is a little easier.
Il aime le travail manuel = He likes manual work.
Les travaux manuels occupent les enfants et aident à leur développement = Manual work occupies children and helps them to develop.
But the main meaning of travaux manuels is arts and crafts.
Travail intellectual is intellectual work in the sense of brainwork or mental work while travaux intellectuels corresponds to the work produced and is often opposed to travaux manuels.
Il fait un travail intellectuel = He does intellectual work.
Jean Michel often says “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ce travail?” to mean“what’s going on here?”
And here are a couple of expressions to finish off:
Le travail c’est la santé which approximately means that work is good for you.
“à travail égal, salaire égal” = equal pay for equal work.
This is going to be a very short post because we are up to our necks in travaux. Travaux, the plural of travail is, interestingly enough, from the low Latin trepalium, instrument of torture, derived from the Latin tres, three, and palus, stake.
Jean Michel en pleins travaux : percement d’un mur de 70 cm.
Well, I can tell you, the pain in both my hands (being left-handed I am fairly ambidextrous) from wielding spatulas, trowels, paint brushes and rollers for the last week certainly makes it feel like torture! The end result will be a laundry, initially without a sink.
Travaux is a very useful word and covers practically anything. Note that in French, it is always used in the plural and never in the singular, in this context. And you can use it by itself without any explanation. Nous faisons des travaux = We doing renovation works/alterations/plumbing and so on.
renovation work = travaux de rénovation
roadworks = travaux routiers
woodwork = travaux sur bois
plumbing work = travaux de plomberie
alterations = travaux d’aménagement
major projects = grands travaux
farm work = travaux de la ferme
metalwork = travaux sur métal
I’m sure you can find plenty of others! Je dois reprendre mes travaux de peinture!
I am a firm believer in learning vocabulary if you want to speak another language with any fluency. However, it has the disadvantage of giving the impression that A always equals B. Which is not true of course.
Notre portail vert qu’on a repeint pendant une vague de chaleur
I still remember learning that gate = barrière = and fence = clôture and find it difficult not to automatically say “barrière” and “clôture” each time The problem is that they are not always equivalents !
Our house in Blois has a portail (which we repainted in a heat wave), which is used to designate a large metal or wooden gate. The bits on either side of our portail are murs or walls because they are made of stone. Our little house also has a portail but it’s wooden.
No barrières in sight! So I asked Jean Michel , “qu’est-ce que c’est qu’une barrière“. He thought about it and very helpfully said “Je ne sais pas”. So I’ll tell you what I think it is. As far as I can see, it refers to a barrier, such as the Great Barrier Reef in Australia (grande barrière de corail), a safety gate or a crowd barrier (une barrière de sécurité), a language barrier (barrière de la langue – now that’s useful!) and more important still, a level crossing gate (barrière de passage à niveau) – you may remember my close shave in Germany last summer.
Une porte cochère
A gate can also be a porte, such as the town gates or gate to a castle or even a garden gate if it looks like a door. Those enormous gates that you see on the façade of many buildings in France originally designed to take a horse and carriage through are called portes cochère.
Une porte de jardin
If it’s not enclosed on all sides by a wall and not big enough to let a vehicle through, it’s a portillon.
Un portillon
A large metal gate that doesn’t have any solid parts the way our green gate does is called a grille d’entrée.
Une grille d’entrée à la Place Stanislas in Nancy (though the actual gates are missing!)
Fortunately, fence isn’t quite as complicated. Below, you can see a clôture which is definitely a fence, but the stone wall behind it is a mur d’enclos.
Une clôture en fer devant un mur en pierre
Theoretically, you can have a clôture en bois such as the one the neighbours used for their chicken yard below, but most people would call it a palissade. The wire fence next to it is a clotûre though.
Une palissade, suivie d’une clôture, suivie d’un portail.
So next time you want to say “fence” or “gate”, I hope you’ll do better than me!
I originally thought the equation was arbre = tree, arbuste = shrub and buisson = bush. Well, I was wrong. The first time I saw a lilac bush, I thought it was a tree. It looked like a tree to me and certainly not like a bush (a lot of the flowers are way above my head), but when I used the word arbre I was immediately corrected. Non, c’est un arbuste.
Le lilas est un arbuste
With the arrival of spring, there are lots of flowering shrubs, so I asked Jean Michel to define arbuste for me. “Un petit arbre“, he replied. “No it’s not.” I replied, “You could call a young conifer un petit arbre but it still wouldn’t be an arbuste.” So I checked my Larousse app. An arbuste is a woody perennial plant less than 10 metres in height whose branches don’t grow from the base.
Then it says in brackets that a young arbuste looks like an arbrisseau (oh dear, I hadn’t even thought of that one !) then starts looking like a tree when it loses its lowest branches.
An arbrisseau has branches coming from the base and doesn’t grow more than 4 metres high. No examples given for either of course.
Le laurier tin est un arbrisseau
According to my Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a shrub is a small bush with several woody stems. A bush is a plant with many thin branches growing up from the ground.
Guess what an arbre is ? A woody perennial plant with branches that grows to at least 7 metres (where did they pull that one from?) and has permanent branches that only start a certain distance from the ground. It’s all relative, isn’t it ?
L’althéa est un arbuste.
A tree is a very tall plant that has branches and leaves and lives for many years, to quote the Longman. That’s a definition? “Very tall”? “Many years”? Hardly precise.
I then consulted my New Shorter Oxford in two volumes just in case it’s more cluey. Well, it’s not. A bush is a shrub or clump of shrubs with stems of moderate length. A shrub is a woody plant, smaller than a tree. A tree is a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.
But listen to the next bit : More widely, any bush or shrub of erect growth with a single stem. Which explains my confusion between trees, shrubs and bushes!
Le cognassier japonais est un arbuste mais peut être taillé en buisson
I went through a few plants with Jean Michel to see what category he would put them in. Let’s see. Lilac is an arbuste, Japonica quince is either an arbuste or an arbuste buissonnant. Oh no, not something else! I’d forgotten about buisson.
The Larousse says it’s an arbuste or group of arbustes with branches growing up from the ground and is difficult to get through. Hey, that sounds like a hedge, doesn’t it ? I thought hedge was haie. Haie is a line of arbres or arbustes forming a limit between two parcels of land. A hedge is a row of small bushes or trees growing close together, usually dividing one field or garden from another. So we can safely say hedge = haie.
I think we’ll just have to forget about the English and concentrate on the correct words to use in French, don’t you ?
L’hortensia est un arbuste.
So, an arbuste looks like a tree only it’s smaller and has low-growing branches e.g. a lilac bush or a holly bush. An arbrisseau has branches growing up from the ground e.g. viburnum tinus (laurier tin), only no one ever says arbrisseau so we can call them arbustes as well, like Japonica quince (cognassier du Japon) and weigela or arbustes buissonnants or even buissons if they are small enough and are trimmed to form a hedge.
If you want to say arbre, check the plant is at least three times your height and has no low branches!
It’s actually Saturday, but we’ve had two days away cycling around Saumur and are now gardening like mad so this is going to be a very quick post.
Relâche is what you say when there is no performance. If a cinema is closed on Mondays, for example, you’d say, le lundi est le jour de relâche du cinéma.
Prendre un peu de relâche means to take a short break, which is what we have just done. Sans relâche means relentlessly (without letting up).
The verb relâcher comes from the Latin relaxare which obviously gave us the verb relax.
Alors, j’ai pris un peu de relâche après avoir travaillé sans relâche pendant presqu’un mois. Résultat: c’est relâche pour Friday’s French.
Se rappeler and se souvenir are almost complete synonyms. I can’t really think of any occasion on which one can’t replace the other. However, there is a grammatical difference which fewer and fewer people observe these days. Se rappeler takes a direct object and se souvenir doesn’t. So what does that mean?
A pair of chairs in Vendôme – nothing to do with memory but I like the photo.
I remember my grandparents well = Je me rappelle bien mes grand-parents OR Je me souviens bien de mes grand-parents.
The difference is that little “de” which most people also tack on to se rappeler.
I remember him = Je me le rappelle OR Je me souviens de lui. But, you mostly hear Je me rappelle de lui which is totally incorrect.
I try to remember not to use “de” with se rappeler but when everyone else around me is using it without the slightest hesitation, it’s not easy because it sounds odd. So I usually use se souvenir!
You can use rappeler without the reflexive, but not souvenir.
While se rappeler means to remember, rappeler means to remind someone of something. Note that while we say “of” in English, THERE IS NO DE IN FRENCH.
Tu me rappelles ma tante = You remind me of my aunt.
Cela ne vous rappelle rien ? = Doesn’t that remind you of something?
Rappelez-moi votre nom = [Literally: remind me of your name] and really corresponds to “Sorry – can you tell me your name again” which is a VERY useful phrase to know if you forget names the way I do.
Another verb that can also be used for “remember” is penser à.
Tu me fait penser à ma tante = You remind me of my aunt.
Cela ne vous fait pensé à rien ? = Doesn’t that remind you of something?
Fais-moi penser à rappeler mon frère = Remind me to ring my brother back.
Which reminds me that rappeler has another meaning i.e. to call back, where the “r” is like “re”, widely used in French to mean again.
Ses affaires l’ont rappelé à Paris = He was called back to Paris on business.
Ma mère a été rappelée au chevet de mon grand-père malade = My mother was called back to my sick grandfather’s bedside. [which is interesting because a chevet is a bedside table).
Souvenir is also a noun of course, with the meaning we know in English, as in souvenir shop.
But its main meaning is “memory”.
Elle a gardé de lui un bon souvenir = She has good memories of him.
Ce n’est plus qu’un mauvais souvenir = It’s just a bad memory now.
Je n’ai qu’un vague souvenir de l’incident = I only have a vague recollection of the incident.
Il m’a raconté ses souvenirs d’enfance = He recounted his memoires of his childhood.
But isn’t mémoire a French word, I can hear you saying. Doesn’t it mean memory? First, it can’t be used in any of the above examples. Souvenir is used when it means “something remembered” while mémoire is used when talking about what our brain does.
Elle a une bonne mémoire = She has a good memory.
Il a une mémoire d’éléphant = He has a memory like an elephant.
Je cite de mémoire = I’m quoting from memory.
C’est inquiétant, elle perd la mémoire = It’s very worrying – she’s losing her memory.
A very useful little phase is pour mémoire which means “as a matter of interest”, “for the record”, “in passing” e.g. Mais tout indique que le sujet n’a, en fait, été mentionné que pour mémoire. = But everything would indicate that the subject was, in fact, only mentioned in passing.
Mémoire is also the term used for a computer memory.
And just to make matters easy, there is a another word mémoire, but this time it’s masculine and it has a completely different meaning!
It can be used for a memorandum, a report, a statement of all the money owed by a customer to a company (you probably don’t need to remember that!), someone’s memoirs and, most importantly for me, a master’s thesis or dissertation.
For about six years during my career as a university lecturer, I was in charge of the dissertations at ESIT and I could never remember whether the word mémoire was masculine or feminine! I devised all sorts of strategies so I wouldn’t reveal my lack of certainty! For example, instead of saying “Son mémoire est en retard” (her dissertation is late), I would say “Elle a dépassé la date limite” (she’s gone over the deadline).
Now who would like to have a try at translating the four phases in bold in the post? Click here for the answers!
“She’s very mundane”, a bilingual French-English speaker said to me recently, obviously thinking that mundane means the same thing as mondain. To start off with, in English, we wouldn’t use mundane to describe a person, but rather something more abstract such as life or existence. Mundane means dull and ordinary or relating to ordinary life on earth rather than to spiritual things.
Une boutique pour les mondaines
Mondain, on the other hand, relates to the social life of what the French now surprisingly call people and what we call celebrities. It also refers the social habits of the bourgeoisie in which relations and conversations are always superficial.
What my friend really meant to say is “She’s a socialite”. Whenever we want to express the idea of mondain, we nearly always need to have society or social in there somewhere.
Elle mène une vie mondaine = She’s a socialite.
Il a le goût pour la vie mondaine = He has a taste for society life (or the high life).
Ce festival est l’évènement mondain de l’année = The festival is the society event of the year.
“Mundane”, on the other hand, probably needs a different translation every time.
On a more mundane level = au niveau pratique
Mundane task = tâche courante
A mundane concern = préoccupation terre-à-terre
I’ve kept “mundane existence” for last because it’s a bit trickier as it has two meanings. A mundane existence can refer to a non-spiritual existence in which case it would be une existence terrestre or profane. However if we’re just referring to the fact that it’s dull and ordinary, we would say une existence banale ou une vie banale.
Speaking of banal, that’s another word which doesn’t mean quite the same in French and in English. Actually, it’s not the meaning that differs so much as the usage. Banal in English means commonplace or trivial, which is more or less what it means in French, particularly when it refers to a lack of originality. However, in English, we don’t say people are banal as we do in French; we say they’re ordinary or run-of-the-mill.
Un personnage peu banal = an unusual character
Une conversation or une idée banale = a trite or banal conversation or idea
Une vie banale could also be translated as a humdrum life.
Une grippe banale = a common case of flu
And to finish up, here’s a very common expression in French: Ce n’est pas banal.
How would you say it in English? And maybe you have some other examples (with their translations!) of mundane, mondain and banal.
