Celebrity-watch watch

The graffiti on this ad says that the police is "Rachida [Dati, French minister of justice] but who is the father of her kid, we don't care!"


Rachida Dati announced her pregnancy in the fall. She is single and says it's none of anyone's business who the father is.

Conventional wisdom has it that the French media and public are much more gracious than the American media and public about leaving their politicians' private lives out of the public sphere. And perhaps this is true. Exhibit number one is usually Mitterand's illegitimate daughter Mazarine Pingeot, whose relationship to Mitterand was not revealed by the press until after Mitterand's death for many years.

Nonetheless, look at the most popular searches that came up as I typed Dati's name into teh Google:


Enceinte is 'pregnant', pere is of course père, 'father', enceinte de qui 'pregnant by whom'.

Then we get ivre 'drunk', nue 'naked', then Bernard Laporte, who was rumored to be the father but denied it, and Paris Match, which is a celebrity magazine that Dati has appeared in, to much criticism.

In any case... evidently someone cares about Dati's extracurricular activities.

A vowel (or two) by any other pronunciation...

Every now and then I'll come up with something I think is a successful pun or a play on words in French, only to be told that it doesn't really work for native French speakers. My French friends sometimes do the same in English. It just serves to underline how different the phonology can be between two languages, even when we're basically understanding each other and being understood.

Here's an example of this phenomenon on an ad in the Paris métro. It's for a play called "Public or not Public." (The word public in French, by the way, means 'audience'.) It took me a while to realize that this title is supposed to be a play on "To be or not to be." The reason is, well, there are two reasons. The first is that the vowel sounds in public are not the same as those in to be. (For you IPA aficionados, public has /ʌ/ (hmm, that's not displaying right, it should be like an upside-down "v") and /ɪ/, while to be has /u/ (if not reduced to a schwa) and /i/.) The second problem is that the stress in public falls on the first syllable, while the stress in to be falls on the second.

Because of these two reasons, public and to be are not sufficiently similar in English for one to be able to stand in for another in a play on words. However, French does not have these vowel contrasts (public would likely be pronounced with the same vowels as to be), nor does it have contrasts of stress. So the title of the play is an acceptable play on words in French-pronounced English. Turns out, as you can read in the comments below, that "X or not X" is perfectly possible in French no matter what X is. So the stuff about English phonology still holds (see the links in my comment below for more on "to X or not to X" in English) but in French, apparently phonology doesn't play a role here. Thanks again, francofriends!

Going there to get you there

These métro ads are for an auto place.

The ad above says "I buff mine every morning." Oh, and that image that just came into your mind? Much clearer in French than it is in English.

And this one says "My husband's never gets (lit. falls) out of order, it's nice."

Stay classy, 321auto.