The Agony of Argot

Just try to decipher this with your French dictionary!

So you were top of your French class in college, you have read Balzac, Baudelaire, and Beauvoir in the original and your French accent is stronger than Pépé le Pew’s. Why is it, then, that when you go to a French film by a young hip director, or watch French TV, or overhear street conversations in Paris you can’t understand a thing? One word answer: argot.

French slang (pronounced “Ar-GO”) has been the bete noire of my French language acquisition, and will likely continue to be an uphill battle, as each generation creates its own new branché (hip) vocabulary to spew in phrases that makes your “ou est la gare?” French useless.

I had been living in France a few years before I even knew that argot existed. The crowd that I was introduced to by a mutual friend when I arrived in France was “BCBG”, an acronym that stands for “Bon Chic Bon Genre”, or bourgeoisie, or in American ‘80s terminology “yuppies”. French yuppies don’t use argot. They speak “good French”, and their nasal enunciation and careful vocabulary encircles them like the cashmere cardigans tied around their shoulders.

Manners make the person in this society, as I learned when I stopped conversation at my first Parisian dinner party by picking up the bottle of wine in front of me and pouring for the man next to me before refilling my own glass (assuming that I was being polite). In the ensuing silence Hugue shuddered preciously as he explained that a woman never touches a wine bottle on the table, and that I should have asked him if I had wanted more wine. Of course, in my mind, the whole purpose of his existence that night was to keep me refilled, and though he was failing miserably in his duty, I was too busy turning purple with shame to point that out.

Needless to say, street language does not factor into these people’s vocabularies so I did not immediately realize what I was missing. After a while, noting lapses of comprehension at the cinema and on television, I began suspecting that there was a whole undercurrent of slangy vocabulary that had completely passed me by. But it wasn’t until a few years later when I started dating Laurent that I was plunged into the world of argot. He and his friends used the alternate language like it was their mother tongue, making it a point of honor to substitute a slang word for the real one when at all possible.

This is the aspect of argot that is hard for Americans to understand: although we use slang we don’t have one slang word (or more) per real vocabulary word, as the French seem to. OK – we could say “wheels” for “car” like their bagnole for voiture or, if we lived in the ‘70s we might say “threads” for “clothes” like they currently use fringues for vetements. We have “chick” (or did) for “girl” like their gonzesse for femme and “cops” for “police” like their flics for policiers. But they have bouffe for “food” and pinard for “wine”, guele for mouth/face, piaule for “room”, fiston for “son” and moche for “ugly”. Almost every word I can think of, noun, verb and adjective, has an equivalent in argot. Every single body part has an argot counterpart, and the more interesting body parts have four or five.

These words are all part of the 1^st level of slang in my personal 3-tiered argot-classification system: the familier, or friendly slang. You can use it amongst friends, family or anyone in your age group. You would not use it at work. I made this mistake with my BCBG boss, the head of 19^th Century Paintings, at Sotheby’s Paris. When she asked me to go out and buy a book for her, I told her that I didn’t have any tune. I caught my gaffe when her jaw dropped to the floor and she exclaimed “where did you hear that word”? “On TV”, I muttered, not explaining that that was the only word I had ever heard my boyfriend use for “money”, and that I thought it was a real word, not argot. She responded with a crisp “you would do better to forget it”, and since that day, the word tune has not passed my lips.

Level 2 would be grossier, or swear words. These can be used with friends (or enemies), never at work, and only within your family if you want to get slapped by your mom. They range from the extremely mild merde (“shit”, but not as strong as that word in English) and con (used like “asshole” but falls between that and “jerk” in mildness) to medium-ranged putain, or shortened pute (literally “whore”, but used to mean both “damn” or “slut”).

Laurent’s mom says mince (“skinny”) or mercredi (“Wednesday”) instead of merde (like saying "darn" instead of "damn") because she is a proper lady. On the other hand, his dad lets merde and con slip into everyday conversation with regularity, but these words have a mild enough usage as to take on a charming roughness coming from him.

Those are the three swear words you will hear on a consistent basis in French, hopefully not directed at you when you hear them. You can string a couple of them together to make an even stronger swear-phrase, but I won’t do that here because my grandmother reads this blog. (Hi Grammy!)

And then there are those choice few carefully-crafted mixes of curse words that result in phrases that would melt the ears off a New York taxi driver. It was, in fact, a Paris taxi driver who used just such a phrase the one and only time I ever heard it pronounced out loud. My friends Kim and Richard had just arrived for a week’s visit, and in a discussion of the French language asked me for the most insulting phrase a Frenchman could say. I couldn’t even utter it out loud, whispering the depraved words as if a group of nuns were listening in from the next room.

Just an hour later we were sitting in the back of a taxi in the middle of a traffic jam, speaking to each other in English, and the taxi driver (surely assuming that we wouldn’t understand) rolled down his window and yelled the phrase at the car in front of us. Kim and Richard broke into cheers, yelling “He said it! He said it!” and chanted the phrase at the top of their lungs, much to the driver’s chagrin. He didn’t look at us for the rest of the trip.

The 3^rd level of argot is the equivalent of American ghetto slang. I first came across it in a discussion of verlan, which is a type of slang made up of inverting a word's syllables (verlan being l’invers, "inverse", backwards). The simplest example is muffe, which is femme, the French word for “woman”, pronounced backwards. You move to the next level of verlan complexity when you take a friendly slang word like flic, or “police”, and turn it backwards to make cuff. And for the real experts, you would have to know that the street slang word for “arab” is “butter” or beure, which then is reversed to make rebeu. Complicating things even more is the fact that these aren’t actually the exact syllables inverted, but kind of a slurred version, which makes it even harder to decipher.

So the 3^rd level of argot is verlan mixed with ghetto slang, like the words that appear in American rap music. I have rarely heard it used by anyone I know. However, the songs on the radio are full of it. And when I went to see the excellent 1995 film “La Haine”, the screenplay might as well have been written in Mandarin Chinese because every word the characters uttered was in this language. After straining to understand the first fifteen minutes of dialogue, I finally sat back and enjoyed the cinematography and patted myself on the back every time I deciphered a muffe, cuff or rebeu.

The most important thing to know about argot is that to understand modern-day French you have to learn it but you shouldn't use it. Unless, that is, you enjoy being an object of ridicule. The other night I told my father-in-law at aperatifs that my back hurt by saying “mon dos est explosé” (“my back is exploded”). I had heard this phrase used many times. But for some reason it elicited peals of laughter from the table. Coming from the mouth of a foreigner argot sounds silly, like hearing a visitor to the States exclaim “sheet!” when they are upset.

Then there is the sexism factor. If I were to use the 2^nd level argot curse words, even without my American accent, it would make me come across a bit “tough broad”ish, whereas if I were a man using them it would be perfectly acceptable. Of course, that makes them even more tempting to use, if only for shock value in breaking the sexism barrier. But until I get a job at a truck stop, I will refrain from indulging in that temptation. Sitting back with my glass of pinard, I will just ferme ma guele and enjoy the fact that after years of struggle I can finally decipher a tiny portion of an insider’s language that I am just beginning to learn.