Fuck Sarko: Strange Anglicisms in France

I went on another hike today, this one all the way out to the 20th arrondisement, almost as far as the Boulevard Peripherique that surrounds Paris proper. Along the way I snapped a shot of some more French graffiti, featuring the concise exhortation pictured above.

It makes me think of the weird ways people use English here. It was just "la rentrée," when everyone goes back to work or back to school after the traditional August vacation, and there was a whole series of children's clothing stores with big signs that said (in English) "Are you ready to go BACK TO SCHOOL?" There are tons of stores with really obvious English names, like "Shoe Store" or "Rent Cars," with helpful explanations in French below the actual names explaining what the store does and/or sells (same goes for "PEEP SHOW" and "SEX SHOP," incidentally.) And, as noted, the graffiti tends to be as much in English as in French.

As you may well already know, the mission of the Academie Française, the official governmental body with jurisdiction over the French language, is to try to preserve the purity of French and to stave off neologisms and foreign (read: English) intruders. I'm hardly the first person to note this, but it's not really working.

On a related note, I've been interested to see how much English people know in Paris. The answer: a weird amount. Many people speak a very school-taught awkward kind of English (not the insanely fluent kind you run into in Holland or Germany), but they still understand it perfectly. I would be elated if I could do the same thing in French; I've found to my dismay that I can speak well enough to get my points across, but I often have no idea what people say back to me.

On a semi-related note, I'm really tired. When I had coffee with my cohort C (the other UCSC grad in the program) before we came over, she told me about how when she had been an undergrad at the Sorbonne for a year, she used to just go to London sometimes so she could speak English and relax a little. Everything about this experience is exhausting: the language barrier, the cultural differences, plus just the stuff that comes with living in a new city anywhere, like learning to navigate it and keeping yourself fed and clean and healthy. I think I was cursed, in a sense, by growing up somewhere I loved...I'm always nostalgic for home.*

* Above and beyond the obvious I-miss-my-wife-my-bunny-my-friends-my-family stuff in this case. I'm talking about a deep-seated ontological nostalgic longing. Word.

P.S. "Sarko" is the nickname people use for the president, Sarkozy. I'm pretty sure it's reserved for people who don't like him.