On his book Émigrés: French Words That Turned English
Cover Interview of July 14, 2021
A close-up
I’d like readers to find their way to the book’s opening
page. That page leads into the center of the book’s preoccupations by an
indirect route, for it reveals an émigré word at work in the unlikely setting
of Winnie-the-Pooh, A. A. Milne’s classic story for children of all ages. Bon-hommy
is the French word. I show how it crackles with the energy of a literary work
that, in a single sentence, reveals so much about English language and culture
in its centuries-old, entangled, relation with French. Here is the page:
It is widely to be observed that
those wishing, at little effort, to lend a certain intrigue to their English
conversation season it with a certain je-ne-sais-quoi or some other soupçon of
Gallic garniture. Even the introverted Eeyore, on occasion, reaches for the mot juste. Eeyore is the old grey donkey who lives in a corner of a field that is
forever England in A. A. Milne’s stories about Winnie-the-Pooh and friends. In
chapter 6 of Winnie-the-Pooh, it is Eeyore’s birthday, a fact that his friends
have all forgotten. When Pooh Bear chances upon Eeyore and wishes him a good
morning, Eeyore doubts that it is a good morning, hinting darkly: “We can’t
all, and some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it.” Pooh asks Eeyore to
explain. The old grey donkey offers the following list of equivalent words and
phrases: “Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush.” A
puzzled Pooh asks, “What mulberry bush is that?”, in response to which the donkey
merely continues his variations on the theme: “‘Bon-hommy’, went on Eeyore
gloomily. ‘French word meaning bonhommy,’ he explained. ‘I’m not complaining,
but There It Is.’”
Et voila?: There It Is, indeed, the
French word that bursts into flower in the midst of the most English sentence.
A word of conspicuously French derivation serves Eeyore’s purposes well. It
would be too painful for him to name in plain English the simple happiness of
being alive that the irrepressible Pooh clearly possesses that morning and
which the old grey donkey can’t and doesn’t, at the best of times, but
especially when it is his birthday and They have all Forgotten. Instead, Eeyore
names obliquely the capacity for happiness that is denied him, alluding to
popular English rhymes that speak of it and producing synonyms that name it. He
brilliantly introduces the last of these synonyms, bon-hommy, as a French word
possessing the meaning of the selfsame word in English. He thereby specifies
that meaning as evident to the likes even of Pooh Bear, while using the
Frenchness of the word to emphasize its distance from himself, the discontented
grey English donkey. His single-word code mixing of French in English at once
connects him to, and separates him from, French ways of saying and being.
Eeyore’s flourishing of bon-hommy
is an act of expressive indirection that reveals much about the history of
English in its centuries-old relation with French…
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
A close-up
I’d like readers to find their way to the book’s opening page. That page leads into the center of the book’s preoccupations by an indirect route, for it reveals an émigré word at work in the unlikely setting of Winnie-the-Pooh, A. A. Milne’s classic story for children of all ages. Bon-hommy is the French word. I show how it crackles with the energy of a literary work that, in a single sentence, reveals so much about English language and culture in its centuries-old, entangled, relation with French. Here is the page:
It is widely to be observed that those wishing, at little effort, to lend a certain intrigue to their English conversation season it with a certain je-ne-sais-quoi or some other soupçon of Gallic garniture. Even the introverted Eeyore, on occasion, reaches for the mot juste. Eeyore is the old grey donkey who lives in a corner of a field that is forever England in A. A. Milne’s stories about Winnie-the-Pooh and friends. In chapter 6 of Winnie-the-Pooh, it is Eeyore’s birthday, a fact that his friends have all forgotten. When Pooh Bear chances upon Eeyore and wishes him a good morning, Eeyore doubts that it is a good morning, hinting darkly: “We can’t all, and some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it.” Pooh asks Eeyore to explain. The old grey donkey offers the following list of equivalent words and phrases: “Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush.” A puzzled Pooh asks, “What mulberry bush is that?”, in response to which the donkey merely continues his variations on the theme: “‘Bon-hommy’, went on Eeyore gloomily. ‘French word meaning bonhommy,’ he explained. ‘I’m not complaining, but There It Is.’”
Et voila?: There It Is, indeed, the French word that bursts into flower in the midst of the most English sentence. A word of conspicuously French derivation serves Eeyore’s purposes well. It would be too painful for him to name in plain English the simple happiness of being alive that the irrepressible Pooh clearly possesses that morning and which the old grey donkey can’t and doesn’t, at the best of times, but especially when it is his birthday and They have all Forgotten. Instead, Eeyore names obliquely the capacity for happiness that is denied him, alluding to popular English rhymes that speak of it and producing synonyms that name it. He brilliantly introduces the last of these synonyms, bon-hommy, as a French word possessing the meaning of the selfsame word in English. He thereby specifies that meaning as evident to the likes even of Pooh Bear, while using the Frenchness of the word to emphasize its distance from himself, the discontented grey English donkey. His single-word code mixing of French in English at once connects him to, and separates him from, French ways of saying and being.
Eeyore’s flourishing of bon-hommy is an act of expressive indirection that reveals much about the history of English in its centuries-old relation with French…