The French are very finical about French.
On August 4, 1994, law 94-665, the Toubon Law*, came into force. No non-French thought could pass into a French head until it was recast in French as a companion French thought.
Then there is the venerable pre-Republican** institution, Académie française. The Académie, lacking the power of law, uses snobbiness, bullying, and parochialism to hobble French with the misplaced, if quaint, notion of French purity. To work its magic the Académie maintains forty seats sat in by 40 immortels, though all but the current crew seem to have died off.
But this very Frenchness, exemplified by the government which is constrained by law to employ only the Frenchest French, confounds the French-speaking citizenry.
France's mighty bureaucracy has acknowledged the havoc wreaked by the near-total impenetrability of the language it uses by publishing a dictionary of the 3,000 most commonly used administrative terms which the average French person does not understand.In the first serious attempt to make Gallic red tape more user-friendly since Francois I dropped Latin as the country's official language in 1539, Le Petit Décodeur - or The Words of the Administration in Plain Language - promises "an end to unfortunate misunderstandings between you and officialdom".
French civil servants, it seems, systematically resort to arcane vocabulary: gracieusement (graciously) instead of "for free"; matricule rather than "number"; quadriennal rather than "every four years"; subroger not remplacer (replace); and bien vouloir avoir l'obligeance de instead of "please would you".
"Many people, including most of those who most need to, give up communicating with the state simply because filling in the forms and understanding the letters is so hard," [Eric Woerth, a junior minister for state reform] told Le Parisien.
The first rule of French jargon-busting is to establish a complete ministry for perpetual reform (Ministère de la fonction publique et de la réforme de l'Etat, MFPREAT) that appoints a huddle (La Délégation aux usagers et aux simplifications administratives, DUSA) that creates a committee (Le Comité de simplification du langage administratif, COSLA), all with acronyms that themselves become undecipherable jargon.
The second rule of French jargon-busting is to charge for the clarity. The government will continue to lumber along with its jargon intact. If you want to know what it is that the government is on about you'll need to shell out € 5.95. (Our link saves you 5%. C'est rien.)
* Several bits and pieces of the drafted bill had been declared unconstitutional.
** In 1635 Louis XIII on the counsel of his chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, granted letters patent establishing the French Academy. During the revolution the Academy was surpressed then abolished outright. It was later restored by Napoleon. Henri Grégoire in his 1794 tract, Sur la nécessité et les moyens d'anéantir les patois et d'universaliser l'usage de la langue française (Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalise the use of the French language [one marvels at the placid Republican subtleness]) remarked that only 12% of France spoke French as their native tongue.
Chirac claims UK and American free trade is responsible for African nations starvation. Oh nothing to do with the subsidies that the french monkeys put into their OWN business's then.
Also says UK should not be payed its 3 billion yearly rebate on our membership of EU, even tho we pay 2 times as much as them smelly, unwashed cowards have.
What is wrong with Blair, french should be told to f*** off before we kick their arses (again).
UK out of EU join American trading block, build loads of missile silos on our east coast.
Then deny then access to our air space, seas and lands. DO NOT BUY FRENCH.
