'French is Trendy'

„French Is Trendy”

A large banner on the second story of the battered brick building which houses the Alliance Francaise sports this slogan. As I stared at it while waiting for my tram, I pondered the series of paradoxes in those three words.

I was waiting there, alone, in the eerily mild greenhouse-gas enhanced warm of the Polish winter, waiting for a tram, because two hours previously, Agata had received a phone call. It was the school where she teaches English lessons, asking if she could substitute for a teacher who had just called in sick. She couldn’t, but told them she had a real ‘native speaker’ handy, and so I was hired, sight unseen.

‘Native speaker,’ being, of course, a Polish word. Its used variously for any speaker of a language everyone else is trying to learn. Which means, 90 percent of the time, an Anglophone.

The French bite down on their cigarettes and fling back their scarves in fury whenever reminded of this fact. Once, it was from French that Polish borrowed all its newest and trendiest words, for luxury items such as “fotels” or aristocratic amusements such as dancing the “polonez.” Now, however, English is the lingua franca, and not enough people speak French even for the Alliance Francaise to advertise in the language its supposed to be propagating. Which is part of the joke, of course, and part of what makes the banner true. For the fact that “French is Trendy” was written in English signifies that French is not indeed a language commonly known, not something that the man on the street can understand, and thus, inherently, qualified to become trendy amongst the hip and the elite. At least, so hopes the Alliance.

Meanwhile, my tram arrived, and I was off to make 15 dollars an hour based on the sole qualification of having been born in an English-speaking country. Napoleon must be rolling in his tomb.