Non, ceci n'est pas un poisson d'avril. This is not an April Food's Day joke. These are real fish that I saw at the marché de l'avenue de Saxe in Paris nearly 10 years ago. In France, an April Fool's joke is called "an April fish" — un poisson d'avril. Maybe people who fall for an April fish are known to say "that stinks!"
I just read a few articles about the French expression un poisson d'avril, and nobody seems to know for sure what its origin is. Some say that April 1 used to be celebrated as new year's day in many French provinces, so it was a holiday. When the French king and the Roman pope declared that the new year would be observed officially on January 1 from then on, people who continued to celebrate it on April 1 were subjected to mockery.
Others say because April 1 was the day the fishing season opened had something to do the fish part of it. Still others say that April was when Lent, the period before Easter when Catholics gave up meat and ate a diet of fish, came to an end. Silly people who weren't paying attention continued eating fish in April, and others made fun of them.
My first memory of a poisson d'avril dates back to 1975. A major Paris newspaper ran a headline saying that government officials had ruled that the new skyscrapers at La Défense were illegally tall and that the top floors had been ordered demolished. People believed it... for a few minutes. Happy April Fish Day! Don't fall for anything.
We had a big snow storm yesterday in Virginia. About a foot. Everything was disrupted.....poisson d’Avril!
ReplyDeleteWe're having a major blizzard here in Saint-Aignan. (April fish!)
DeleteSérieusement, il fait un froid de canard ce matin. On risque de voir quelques flocons de neige cet après-midi.
DeleteWe had une averse de neige just a minute ago.
DeleteHa! I had never done any research on Poisson d'Avril origins, I guess... I had never heard any of those interesting back stories!
ReplyDeleteI have done two pranks on my students, in previous years: one was a set of Word Search games, where all of the students were looking for all of the same 10 words, and thought that they all had the same puzzle. But, a few of the students had word searches that didn't actually contain any of the words. It was kind of fun watching them looking around at other kids, highlighting word after word, and they couldn't find any! Ha!
That same year, in my French-4 class, we were having a vocab test (pertinent words for Hébergement et Tourisme dans le Val de Loire, in fact!), over about 60 words, all just given in French, to translate into English. One of the students was the kind of kid who studied diligently for everything, and almost always got 100% on everything. So, on his test, I added 4 words that he had never seen before, so he kept looking and looking at these words he couldn't translate, and he looked SO perplexed, about how he could have missed these words! Sounds silly, but it was a good Poisson d'Avril for my fabulous, nerdy French-4 students :) Of course, I eventually explained :)
No Poisson d'Avril for me at school today, because I am home after a dental procedure... interesting that you just had a visit with your new dentist, too :)
Judy