The Times - UK (2020-10-17)

28 1GM Saturday October 17 2020 | the times

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because it gives me heartburn and all

the good fizz is British now; “je ne

sais quoi”, because if you don’t know,

shut up; “chic”, because I’m not and

don’t want to be; “avant garde”,

because art was fine how it was;

“cinéaste”, because they’re only

movies, mon ami, and nobody cares;

“salon”, because a load of failed

artists sliming up to an oligarch’s wife

doesn’t deserve a word of its own,

and “trompe l’oeil” because painting

a pretend garden on a kitchen wall

and calling it something French does

not detract from its fundamental

dishonesty. In fact, it adds to it.

I’m also sending back “déjà vu” (or

have I already said that?), “voilà!”

because we’ve already got the

perfectly good English word,

“eureka!”, “déjà vu”, and “le coq

sportif”, because it’s just rude.

I’d also like to do away with “roué”,

which is French for “old groper”. I

cannot believe there is a roué left out

there without a #MeToo case

pending. And let’s say goodbye to

“savoir-faire”, with its grotty, Charles

Aznavourish implications of exotic

sexual competence. “Knowhow”,

with its sexless actuarial smugness, is

much more English.

I actually quite liked “idiot savant”

until we elected one for our prime

minister, who then turned out not to

“savoir” anything. “Par excellence” is

too pretentious by half when a

simple “ne plus ultra” will do, “raison

d’être” just makes me think of

sultanas, let’s drop “cul de sac”,

because “arse of a bag” is no way to

talk about a respectable dead end,

and, finally, “déjà vu”.

Damn! I forgot “l’esprit de

l’escalier”. Isn’t that always the way?

If the French are sending back our good old English words, we should frogmarch their lisping lingo across the Channel

Voilà! That’s the last time I get a déjà vu feeling

suburbs by ancient toff snobberies,

but now we must go further and

send back all the other irritating

Gallicisms that have crept into

common usage to describe things we

don’t want or need any more, if we

ever did in the first place.

Let’s be rid of “faux pas”, for

example, which was only ever a

mealy-mouthed way of saying “f***

up”, and “gauche”, which I find

ghastly, and ought to be “ghastly”.

And let’s also send back the “amuse-

bouche”, not just to the kitchen

which sent it out but to the country

it came from, for it was only ever a

grotty little free starter that we didn’t

order because we didn’t want it. And

“restaurant” too, while we’re at it,

seeing as we can’t meet mates in

them any more, and very soon they’ll

be gone for good.

I’ve had enough of “bonhomie”,

too, which only means “drunkenness”,

about which there is nothing bon at

all. Oh, and “bon viveur” which only

ever meant a fat, handsy old lech who

wouldn’t live past 60. It is a typically

French concept and totally irrelevant

in the Britain of 2020, where we’ve all

got to lose weight, get sober, stay in

and shut up.

And they can have back “jus”, too.

It’s bloody gravy, mate. And I’m

bored with feeling compelled by the

gods of comedy, every time a waiter

comes to the table and says, “Jus?”, to

reply, “Yes I am, but not practising,

and I’m OK for gravy, thanks.”

On my watch, “entrepreneur” will

be handed back, manacled, at the

border (perhaps in a direct swap for

“le baseball cap”), because it just

means an unemployed playboy with

a crap idea for an app; “champagne”,

their words in our half, as well as ours.

Why, for example, do we have the

word “ox” for an ox, and the word

“beef” for the same animal’s dead

flesh served with roast potatoes,

when the French have only “boeuf”,

meaning both? I’ll tell you why. It is

because we English farmed the cattle

and then our greasy Norman

overlords took them away and ate

them. Same thing with sheep/

mutton, calf/veal, swine/pork...

these are all grotesque linguistic

relics of our colonial exploitation

under French rule, and it’s time to

send them home.

Already words such as “toilet” (in

Old English, “bog” or “khazi”),

“perfume” (I prefer “scent” or

“pong”) and “mirror” (“looking-

glass”) have been banished to the

Amuse-bouche is just a posh name for

a grotty starter we didn’t even order

I

n one of the French government’s

familiar periodical assaults on the

intrusion of vulgar English words

into its own elegant, lisping, frilly

girl’s blouse of a language,

France’s culture ministry this week

announced a clampdown on the use

of our brutal tongue in, of all things,

fashion, publishing a lexicon of

native French terms that it wants

used from now on, instead of the

British borrows that have become

standard wherever cheese-eating

surrender monkeys foregather to

whang on about dresses.

“Top models”, for example, must

henceforth be called “mannequins

vedettes” rather than “les top models”,

even though a “top model” isn’t really

a thing in English anyway. Instead of

“le pop-up store”, it is to be “la

boutique éphémère”. And instead of

“le streetwear”, Froggy lingo Nazis are

demanding “la mode de la rue”.

It is a losing battle, of course.

Having worked for a year in a Paris

fashion boutique myself, back in the

early 1990s (dans le department

“roughwear” du flagship store Polo

Ralph Lauren), I remember that they

didn’t even have their own words for

such basics as “le T-shirt”, “le

sweatshirt” or “le pullover”, let alone

“le greenwashing” — which was a

right bugger for me, because while I

could just about pass for native when

saying proper French words like

“chemise” and “pantalon”, trying to

pronounce our words in their accent,

because they didn’t have a word of

their own, always made me feel like

Inspector Clouseau: “Il est super

sexy, ce T-shirt — très cool avec un

blue jean.. .”

And the Académie Française hates

it, too. Over the years, they’ve tried

to stamp out everything from

“l’internet” and “le hashtag” to “le

tennis”, “le football” and “le

weekend” — this last proving

especially tricky in a land where the

very concept is a novelty, nobody

having done a full week’s work there

since the revolution.

I thought the academy had given

up, but if the French are once again

expelling our English words from

their soil (“vintage”, “fast fashion”

and even “designer” were given their

marching orders last night and

ferried back across the Channel at

gunpoint), then I am calling for a

suitable diplomatic response, in the

form of tit-for-tat expulsions of

French words from English.

We fought a war so that our

children and grandchildren wouldn’t

have to grow up speaking French.

Unfortunately, we lost it. 1066 and all

that. And we’ve had too many of

their words ever since. Look at any

translator’s dictionary and you’ll see

that the English-French half is

much thicker than the French-

English one, because we’ve got all of

‘Bonhomie’ just means

drunkenness and ‘bon

viveur’ is a fat old lech

Giles

Coren

Jonathan Tulloch Nature Notebook

Rare fungus

would look

at home in a

horror movie

S

easons of mists and mellow

fruitfulness and...

mushrooms. For those of us

with an interest in nature,

there is always a full calendar.

Never a month, a week or even a day

goes by without something fresh to

see — and as the flowers fade, the

fungi take centre

stage. From the

red

polka

dots

of the

classic

toadstool

fly agaric, which

decorate birch woods

like freshly painted

pantomime props, to the

giant puffballs scattered in

fields, as though kicked there

during some abandoned game of

football, it’s all waiting to be

discovered. And the less you know,

the more there is to find out.

crisscrossing little rivers and sudden

hollows, it’s one of those places that

invite you to lose your way. Evening

was coming on when we heard one

of the great sounds of autumn: a

flock of pink footed geese, far left,

flying overhead.

Pinkfoots might be one of our

smaller geese but their cacophonous,

joyous racket sounded out over the

fields like a thousand tooting

clarinets. V-shape after V-shape sang

in the dusk.

They had come from the far north.

Iceland, maybe, or Greenland.

Possibly even the Arctic Ocean

island of Spitzbergen. They were

bound for the great estuaries of

Humberside, Lincolnshire and

Norfolk. Standing in the depths of

North Yorkshire, watching and

listening, we were connected to the

rest of the world by these musical

skeins: the goose grapevine.

Such goose music is the

soundtrack of autumn and there is

nowhere better to hear it than

Britain. An estimated 400,000

pinkfoots choose to overwinter on

our soggy isles, that’s 90 per cent of

the world population.

Jonathan Tulloch’s latest book is

Glimpses of Eden: Field Notes from the

Edge of Eternity

of humpbacked whales. Behind us

lay the Hambleton Hills where our

home village hides. But I wasn’t

looking at the stunning views. My

eyes were focused much closer at

hand, on the wych elm tree standing

tall on the bank.

Though youngish (about 40 years

old), it was already taking on the

majestic shape of the mature elm,

which once filled Britain and the

paintings of Constable. Was it one of

the disease-resistant “super elms”

which will hopefully spread, bringing

these gentle giants back to every

corner of the country?

Friends from the north

W

e always get lost coming

home from the farm. With

its network of back lanes,

The bleeding tooth fungus

My fungi adventure began when I

was collecting wood for the stove. I’d

gone into an alder thicket through

the “deer door” (an opening in the

trees caused by the resident roe

deer), and was looking for ash

branches, easily the finest firewood.

Stooping to pick up a branch, a

windfall from one of last winter’s

storms, I saw what looked like a

raspberry meringue growing at the

foot of an old ash tree.

On closer inspection, I realised it

was a fist-sized fungus, and that the

glistening red looked more like blood

than raspberry jam. I knew that

inkcap mushrooms dissolve

themselves into ink, but was there a

species that bleeds? Little did I know,

I had just found one of Britain’s

rarest fungi.

Uncommon in

Scotland, it isn’t

even supposed to exist

in England:

Hydnellum peckii, or

bleeding tooth

fungus.

Rushing

home to

research

the find,

I discovered that the

seepage which looked so

much like blood oozing

from a wound was actually

sap; and that bleeding tooth fungus,

also known as devil’s tooth or

strawberries-and-cream, might look

like something from a horror movie

but actually may prove a great friend

to humanity. Along with

anticoagulant and antibacterial

properties, it also has a chemical

which may one day be used to treat

Alzheimer’s disease.

Soggy autumn, with its fraying

daylight and plunging temperatures,

might feel gloomy, but it’s a festival

of fungi. Flamboyant, mysterious,

one of the great kingdoms of life is

waiting to be discovered.

Gentle giants return

I

n the wrong place, of course, fungi

can cause problems, as anyone

susceptible to athlete’s foot knows.

The tree where the bleeding tooth

fungus grew was showing early signs

of ash dieback, caused by a fungus

which originated in Asia.

Dutch elm disease fungus was

imported on Asian timber during the

First World War, and by the end of

the 1970s had destroyed 25 million

UK elm trees.

Here and there, survivor elms can

be found. At the weekend we visited

our niece on her farm. Following her

through the orchard, along crab

apple-laden hedgerows and across a

field where her fiancé was busily

muck spreading, she took us to the

banks of the Swale.

Across the river the Yorkshire

Dales lined the horizon like a school

@jonathantulloch