At some point I realized that if I were going to truly learn French I had to drop the negative, smarmy, and holier-than-thou attitude. On particularly tough, depressing days I take out my frustrations on French culture and language. I poke fun at its hoity-toity rhythms, lambaste its delicate pronunciations, decry its lip-numbing (literally) formations and self-indulgent flowery-isms (who needs poetry in English when you have the suffix –ism?), and, most irritatingly, its play on words or jeux de mots. The French LOVE word play. My husband Marc has always told me about this, a phenomenon that had crossed the Atlantic and become an integral part of Quebecois culture as well. Word play isn’t just for the average cornball. In France it’s considered intellectual, as common as an octogenarian reading a bande desinée or comic book, and funny. Much of French humor is tied to word play because 1) there are so many words that sound alike and 2) so many of those same words that contain several, extremely unrelated meanings. The possibilities are endless. And so I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn about Verlan. Verlan is a language within a language. I can’t help but think of Ebonics as the near-perfect analogy. Both originated in the suburbs (meaning outlying city areas as opposed to strictly ghettoes), both were propagated by the hip hop community, and both have become accepted – to a certain degree – in every day life and interactions. Verlan began in Paris in the 1930s, gained momentum in the 70s and then saw an explosion in the 90s when French rap began to take off and reach a wider audience. (Here’s the departing point in my comparison, as Ebonics is generally used by the African-American population and Verlan is used by the populace at large.) Now Verlan is fashionable – it is a verb, verlaniser, much like “google” – although some already consider it ringard (corny, old-fashioned) and even d’une mauvaise manière (of a poor manner). Each to his own. But Verlan is a curiously interesting function of modern language-users; we continually attempt to make language less complex and more accessible by reducing syllables, dropping and/or rearranging letters, and inverting entire words. I find the opposite to be true, and it makes me wonder, somewhat nervously, what language(s) will be like 100 years from now, even earlier…which brings to mind David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas,” when in a futuristic world brand names become verbs and nouns. Nonetheless, one of the first mot verlanisé that I came across – without knowing it at the time – was keuf. Keuf means flic, or “cop,” in French. And keuf is flic, à la verlan. I mean, can’t you tell?! Here’s how that one works: keuf (keu-fli) = "flic" (fli-keu). In a way it works like Pig Latin: by dropping the final consonant sound “c” (as in “cut”) and adding the vowel sound –eu, the word thereby loses its original vowel sound to become “keu.” Add the “f” and voila!, you have the verlanised word keuf. But this is only what generally happens with a monosyllabic word. The rules are different for words of two syllables (apparently the simplest form) and for those with three or more. It must be known, however, that Verlan is intended to be a personalized language so although there are some “rules” none are set in stone. Here are a few more examples just to rattle your brain a bit:
zarbi = "bizarre"
zyva = "vas-y" (go ahead)
Moi → ouam
Toi → ouat
Méchant → chanmé (mean)
Gentil → tigen (nice)
Métro → tromé ou trom
Voiture → turvoi (car)
So far, les mots verlanisés haven’t held much appeal for me, perhaps because I’m still plowing through vernacular French. Then again, if and when the time comes that I do use Verlan I think it’ll be a huge sign that I’ve become more French than I would have ever imagined…et ca sera zarbi!
The third and final man is our guide. He was young, a couple of years younger than me, but had grown up, as I imagine him, living and breathing Port. He had worked for a variety of Port companies and found Graham's the most authentic (despite it being run by an immigrant Scottish family) and the least commercial. There he has free reign. His guides are completely his. He goes on tangents, he gives his opinion, he holds up the other group behind us in order to finish his point. There's no script, no timed pauses. During the flight of vintage Port wines, he explains how the French are too chatty, the Americans not interested enough, the Germans and the Dutch too impatient to drink, and that in all his experiences the most enthusiastic listeners who pose the best questions are, drum roll please, the Maltese. Go figure. One day he had a large group of Maltese, about 50 strong, who were so attentive, so involved, and so patient (instead of running to the tables after the tour and guzzling down drinks they waited for him to tell them what to do) that he cried. He cried in front of 50-some people because their love of Port wine matched his own and so he cried because he was happy. He cried as they gave him their addresses in Malta, telling him to come visit. And he almost seemed to want to cry when telling us this story.
Needless to say, I am now an ardent fan of Port wine. (And a factual tidbit: Graham's 2000 Vintage Port, which I tasted, was 1 of 5 Graham ports, a rarity in and of itself, to make it on the 2006 Wine Spectator's top 250 wines from 1995-2005.)
