Minding our language*

It is time I lived up to the claim in my description, in the words that appear above, of what Salut! is about when it is not about France: "much more besides".

All that scolding in the comments field after my posting on the pools win that wasn't - the use of irony went down poorly with Smiley - reminded me of one of life's lesser known certainties.

but hey, if the hound gets it, who cares?
Picture: glenfinlas

If you somehow acquire a reputation as a pedant, as I did when working on the newsdesk of a newspaper that cared quite a lot about style and grammar, you should not be surprised to find that people cannot wait for you to falter.

Tim - to be a tragedy, or not to be a tragedy - and Smiley, along the lines of get a grip man, your dad did win the pools, left me with that biter bit sort of feeling I have not experienced since I sparred with belligerent contributors to my Telegraph blog.

But it is all perfectly fair sport, so far as I am concerned. How could it be otherwise when I post a reply promising to write about pendantry, as Bill spotted so sharply in his much-missed riposte (something to with suspense, I think, though this posting offers him the chance of another outing for his "best joke in a long time")?

Many of the people I have encountered over the years would be surprised to hear that anyone ever saw fit to make me a custodian of the correct use of English. The queue would be headed by all those teachers I failed to impress at school, and close behind would be the ghost of the Bishop Auckland alderman who interrupted a breathless telephone interview to exclaim: "Stop gabbling, young man."

My newsdesk job naturally went far beyond the discouragement of tabloid constructions, which have become commonplace throughout the media, and the lazy repetition of infantile reporting devices that are the stock in trade of most news agencies.

But that part of my role was justified by the strict view, taken by the man who then edited the paper, of style breaches, sloppy grammar and incorrect use of words.

Colleagues liked to mock my attempts to enforce the editor's will, not least because there were also issues of my own choosing to be raised from time to time.

If the policy had any success, it was in making reporters and specialists a little more careful about the stories they submitted. Any newspaper tends to look more grown-up when it does not simply shovel news agency copy - or copy that might have been dashed off by a news agency - into its pages, but looks to its own staff for work of a higher standard.

Only once was I given cause to regret the enthusiasm with which I approached this part of my work.

That was when the Queen's English Society invited me to be the guest speaker at its annual general meeting. Even without the ribbing of colleagues who threatened to organise a coach party and barrack every word, I would have seen that this was hardly a situation in which I could not lose.

The newspaper stickler was entering the domain of the hardcore pedant.

There was, of course, the coward's escape route. I was sorely tempted. In the end, I decided to accept the invitation and set myself the task of composing a speech with sufficient flattery of the society and its work, and modesty about my own efforts, to see me through without too much damage.

The first part was easy; I needed only to summarise the reason for the invitation, an exchange of letters in which I had accepted the QES's criticism of a particular news report.

The society's official with whom I corresponded was so accustomed to being ignored, or at best to receiving pompous replies to all such approaches, that she warmed instantly to this man who actually wrote back in agreement.

But the second component of my self-defence mechanism was trickier.

I realised that the society's members would study every word of my speech, and every aspect of its delivery, and spare no mercy in the event of the slightest slip.

So I used the following paragraph in my attempt to pre-empt any such challenge:

When I sat down to write this speech, I privately gave it the working title, 'Confessions of a Pedant'. I am not sure that I have necessarily lived up to that self-billing. I am, in my own way, a pedant, but I feel I have little to confess. I hope that my colleagues regard my interventions as helpful, not those of a bully. I do not present myself to them, and I certainly do not present myself to you, as one whose own written or spoken English is beyond reproach. Readers, fellow journalists and others have taken me to task more than once. I take full responsibility for each flattened vowel, any grammatical lapse and all flawed logic.

It didn't leave them much scope for launching a ferocious assault when it came to questions, and it is my response to critics now.

* The title eventually given (by me) to the speech to the Queen's English Society AGM at the New Cavendish Club, west London on September 27, 2003.

Pride, prejudice and the press

Reading about the life and times of Maurice Papon, the Vichy collaborator who signed French Jews' death warrants, I felt the glow of distantly reflected pride.

Where Papon's deportees ended up
Picture: Danielzolli

Here, and over at Roy Greenslade's Guardian blog, there has lately been talk of how ritualistic prejudice againt the press leads to grotesque libel awards that (should) bring shame to the countries and courts in which they are made.

Not everyone agrees with me or the similar, though hardly identical, views expressed by my fellow blogger.

But turning to Papon, let us start with the proposition that his exposure as a war criminal was no bad thing.

That will not seem too controversial a point to most of those who stray into Salut!.

But how did that exposure come about, given that Papon proceeded from being the second most senior French official in wartime Bordeaux to a very prominent post-war career in public life (though that career was scarcely without disgrace)?

It came about because the press (newspapers) did what it is - they are - best at.

In May 1981, France's satirical weekly, Le Canard Enchainé, revealed documents establishing Papon's culpability in the deportation of nearly 1,700 Jews from Bordeaux to the Drancy internment camp on the outskirts of Paris between 1942 and 1944.

Many of these unfortunates went from Drancy to Auschwitz. Very, very few came home. As the Allied victory neared, Papon saw what was coming and switched sides, reinventing himself as a Resistance informer and later collecting an honour from General de Gaulle for his pains.

Ultimately, he was jailed for 10 years for crimes against humanity. He fled to Switzerland but was returned to serve all of three years of his sentence.

As a self-confessed liberal on penal issues, I have no real complaint about his release in 2002 on health grounds. But Papon goes to his grave having never found the courage or humility to admit to his wrongdoing.

He insisted to the end that he was the blameless victim, as (with variations to the theme) is so often the case among those who dislike how they portrayed in newspapers, of "unprecedented media pillorying made up of lies, insults and infamy".

Great stuff, Le Canard Enchainé! I have said the French press is more decent but also more dull than the British variety, but here it managed to be both immensely decent and a long way from dull.

And so it is on the other side of the Channel. The press, from ruthless proprietors to individual journalists, makes plenty of mistakes. Sometimes the mistakes are serious and, much more rarely, they have serious consequences.

But often, the press is punished disproportionately for its mistakes; the rich, powerful and merely fortunate would be horrified at how low I'd cap libel awards, while insisting on due - OK, French-style - prominence for apologies or corrections.

And almost always, the press attracts far less praise than it deserves when it acts in its own loftier traditions.

Leave aside the unmasking of war criminals or the spotlights trained on government and corporate injustices.

For every unfairly criticised politician, pop star and supermodel, there are scores of ordinary people who have been assisted, by local and national newspapers alike, towards some semblance of fair treatment in their David vs Goliath battles with gas boards, insurance companies, banks and other private or public bodies.

Unfashionable, especially on a blog, and probably unnecessary since I no longer have a newspaper job, but true.

France in flashes.....8

Soon I will be leaving Paris, but not France. Two-and-a-half years in the City of Light is not much of a milestone but it's the longest I've lived anywhere outside London since the 1980s.

Thanks to this Parisian phase of my life, and indeed to living in France generally,
I am able to start listing - in no special order - a few of the things I now know.

It is a work in progress; the number in the headline will change each time I have a flash of inspiration and want to add something and - as now - I may bring it to the top of the blog.

New thoughts will always appear first in the list but the earlier comments from readers are at the original posting.....feel free to find inconsistencies with what I wrote in 2003.




************** WHAT I KNOW NOW **************

* Paris may not, despite a former colleague's insistence, be the City of a Thousand Bad Restaurants. But I am up to double figures and truly believe London now has a distinct edge on quality, variety and service - though not always value.

* Provincial France is still streets ahead for eating out. But my search for a good Indian restaurant seemed doomed to failure until I stumbled the other night upon Le Royal Shah Jahan at Enghien Les Bains, where 95 (Val d'Oise) meets bad old neuf-trois (Seine St Denis). Easily the best I've had in France. It was our friends' fallback idea after their first choice, at Argenteuil, turned out to be full.

* The French press is more decent - and more dull - than its British counterpart. One (French) theory, heard again today, holds that the country has just two seriously good daily papers: L'Equipe for sports lovers and Mon Quotidien (plus stablemates) for kids.

* Anyone who voluntarily leaves a proper job in France, even a job he or she loathes, is considered mad unless there is something immediate fixed up.

* From the millionaire to the man on the Boulevard Masséna tram, French people know how to appreciate good food. The mountainous plateau de fruits de mer served to my table yesterday could have been ordered at either end of that spectrum (and indeed was, though I'm not saying which).

* And at both ends, they know how tipping is done at the restaurant in France: sparingly or not at all, and without hint of self-consciousness.

* People who insist you should never dine in or near railway stations don't know Paris. Two of my best eating experiences have been at the Brasserie Terminus Nord directly opposite Gare du Nord and, complete with fabulous arty decor, Le Train Bleu inside the Gare de Lyon.

** Châtelet is probably the grimmest of Métro stations unless you are going through without stopping, but if you do have to change, alight or board there, it also has the best buskers on the system.

* When a Parisian receptionist welcomes you with the question: "Is someone behind you?", this is not because she assumes such a nice person would surely have friends queuing up to accompany you. It's her way of telling you to close what you thought was an automatic door, and sharpish.

* Charles de Gaulle airport is not, repeat NOT, the least user-friendly place in the world to fly to or from. Not quite. But getting to terminal three offers a strong challenge to that view.

* Toulon, the nearest town of any size to where I'll be living come January - at least in the short term - has been placed bottom or second bottom in league tables for economic activity, employment, culture and heaven knows what else. Have I made a dreadful mistake? The eastern city of Nancy, which I have never visited, came top in one of these palmarès des villes.

* Policemen on roller skates and - when deployed as traffic cops - bicycles will always look like something out of a French farce.

* Marks & Spencer should be ordered to re-open its Paris store. Don't take my word for it; ask a native Parisian.

* The French are not the worst drivers in Europe and probably not even the second or third worst.

* It is therapeutic to swear in English at psychopathic drivers who try to mow you down on green at pedestrian crossings. But this is not advisable if you happen to be having a mobile phone conversation with a charming American lady at the same time.

* If you want to find out something from a French ministry, make friends with a French official in London. Exposure to le modèle Anglo-Saxon will have given him a hint of urgency.

* Power walking or gentle jogging in the Tuileries is not recommended for those liable to feel like physical wrecks in the presence of superfit Parisian sapeurs pompiers.

* Arriving on time, for dinner, drinks or similar, is a serious gaffe. Getting there early is positively insulting and destined to bring social exclusion.

* Gard du Nord handles people more efficiently than Waterloo. And no one there will try to serve you wine in a cardboard cup.

* Anna Perry was right. The Champs Elysées may look pretty when lit up for Christmas - see above for photographic support, however amateurish, for that claim - but feels ugly and naff most of the time and, at the bottom end, menacing late at night.

* Brits who want to live in France, but stick to English-speaking ghettos and recoil in horror from any idea of integration, bring disgrace on their country and should go home.

* French reality and game shows are even worse than those on British TV. And French television generally is dire.

* Leaving Paris on a TGV feels much better than coming back.

* Coming back to Paris on Eurostar feels much better than leaving.

Here's an explanation I prepared earlier