Le franglais à Niort

What a difference a day can make. When we walked around the small city of Niort on October 26 — just a little more than 2 weeks ago — I remember that the morning was chilly and gray. Rain was moving in. It was the end of meteorological, if not astronomical, summer. Since then, we've had a lot of rainfall — 41 millimeters (1.6 inches). It's not yet cold here, however. We've had just one frosty morning that I can remember.

The weather had been dry and sunny nearly every day for 4, even 5, months. That Friday morning in Niort, I remember saying to Walt that I was cold. It was time to go home. Back to the gîte, first, because we needed to heat up some food for lunch and then spend the afternoon getting packed up for the drive back to Saint-Aignan. In the photo above, that's Walt with Tasha on the leash, getting some cash out of an ATM (un distributeur de billets de banque) in Niort. Tasha seems very interested in what he's doing. Maybe she thinks the machine dispenses something good to eat.

French towns are very gray when the weather is dismal. Window shutters and storefronts provide striking splashes of color on such days. Here are three splashes of bold reds that I photographed in Niort that morning. I have a hard time understanding the point of the Franglais name of the women's clothing shop above. It has some English in it, which makes it exotic and cool in France today, I think. Or maybe just funny.

And here's another shop with a Franglais name. French people who don't really speak English understand the expression "too much" — too much c'est too much, you'll hear people say. That's so much cooler than trop c'est trop, don't you think? But it's hard to understand what Tattoo Much might actually mean. Tattoo in French is tatouage [tah-too-ahzh].

"Sex shop" is another English expression that people in France understand, whether or not they speak any English. If you look up "sex shop" in the English-French dictionary, the translation you get is sex-shop. It's as if sex shops, which can also be called boutiques érotiques, are an invention of and import from what the French call le monde anglo-saxon. We think of the French being focused on érotisme and sexualité, while they seem to think we brought all that to France. You have to wonder why the X on the shop's sign is a wooden cross.