Eating And Language

Eating In Company
One of the big differences in my life here to that in England is the number of times I eat with friends. While in England I could probably count on both hands the number of times I ate with friends in a year and those occasions were mostly in restaurants. When friends are even just 30 miles apart, it always seemed to take a significant effort to arrange to meet up and eat. Here it all seems much simpler.

Part of it may be distance, part may be the meal itself. Part of it also must be the love of food and drink and conviviality. Since most of my friends here are within walking distance or a very short car ride, it's just much easier to get together. And since the meals generally mean giving thought to just one dish, it's easy to invite people off the cuff. Starters are easy (Russian salad with egg, some charcuterie and salad, melon), then the main course, then cheese, then fruit or buy a flan or ice cream or, if I'm energetic, do some pancakes. And that happens here always more than once a week.

This week, for example, Steve and Jo came over to eat on Sunday and I did pork chops à la Estremadura. Pretty simple really. Monday, I was going for a pizza evening when two friends emailed to invite me to eat with them: Anita and Pierre Boillot, he an ex-diplomat mostly in the Middle East and south America and she a Louisianan. They had family staying with them, Pierre's sister who had married an Englishman and who are now living 100 miles north of London. Good conversation and a good meal. Tomorrow, Dave and Hazel, friends of Steve and Jo who have rented a neighbouring house, have invited me to eat. And so it goes on................I'm probably due to make another shepherds' pie for Daniel (it always has to be that when he comes) and there are others whom I shall invite to eat once the annual round of grandchildren visiting has passed, when September comes.

It was never like this in England. Is it France, the make-up of the meals or just small village life? And that's not including the numerous invitations to aperos.

Language
When Steve and Jo came over on Sunday we got to talking about language, Steve having been reading Pinker's “The Language Instinct”. So I lent him my copy of “Words And Rules” and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Languages. Language always seems to be a fertile topic of conversation, even if we are (as we often are) just puzzling over French expressions, similarities and disparities with their English equivalents and their derivations.

It's surprising how often, usually in pizza evening discussions, we discover that French and English expressions have exact equivalents. On the other hand, if the similes/metaphors are obvious and from common life experiences, perhaps it's not so surprising. It's the differences that are more interesting: while we English sometimes have a frog in our throat the French have a cat in theirs. We go for the sound, they go for the feeling. The French actually make a lot of use of cats in colloquialisms; what have cats done to deserve this?

Added to all this is the use of particular words. I feel that that best basis for understanding usage is to try to get at the root meaning of the word (the meaning not the lexicography), which usually involves getting back to the Latin or Greek origin. However, how the French came up with tiring (fatiguer) a salad rather than tossing it still defeats me.

Charles Simonyi at Microsoft tried for years to formulate a language (although he refused to call it such) of what he called “intentions” (meanings?), a formulation that would be computer-language independent. Thus, an intentional object would have a computer language as a method for expressing it. For some time (early 90s) Simonyi would talk about nothing else. It no doubt had its fallout in Microsoft's intermediate language but never really got anywhere (as far as I know). It always struck me as Chomsky-esque territory at its most theoretical and I ventured into that only with the most awful dread.