One morning earlier this week, the part-time secretary of our small company entered my office and said, "Good morning. How are you?"
I was a bit shocked. It was the first time something like that had happened to me before.
If you're surprised that I was shocked, then it has probably never happened to you either.
And by 'it' I mean the shift from vous to tu. You see in French there are two words for 'you', that carry with them separate sets of conjugations and nuanced meanings about the relationship between the two people.
When I first studied in France many, many moons ago I struggled to master the distinction. I was mainly around fellow students, and so I developed the reflex of using the informal tu form with everyone.
Unfortunately, it shouldn't be the reflex. One time during a French-American Club meeting I asked the sponsoring professor a question about his opinion on stereotypes only to get dirty stares from the French students in the room. One panickingly whispered to me, "Vous, vous...not tu!"
This was obviously not the first time an American student had used the tu form with him, and so he very light-heartedly dismissed the slight to his position. But I had committed a faux pas all the same.
Since then, I have developed better reflexes when choosing which form to use with people: vous with anyone in public places I don't know, customers, and superiors (the very concept of a superior is hard for an American to wrap his mind around...) and tu with people my own age. And without exception those distinctions have stayed that way. Either we move to the tu form in the very first conversation or we stay with the more distanced vous form.
When I first met the secretary earlier this year, we began with vous. She didn't know me, and she was a few decades older than me. We didn't talk a lot and I didn't expect to go out for beers with her. So I thought it would continue that way, just as it had with all other formal relationships I had previously had.
Last week while stuffing envelopes with invoices together we had a few good laughs. One might say we even bonded. And then the next time I saw her, she walked into my office and said, "Good morning. How are you?"
Except this time she used 'tu'.
Do you think like is a little like using Ma'am and Sir (in certain parts of the US)? I really struggled when working as a receptionist in England to express that little bit of formality/respect when I felt the situation called for it; I don't think everyone got the Ma'am and Sir thing.
ReplyDeleteSure. It's a smaller version of the same issue. I think the problem that we Americans have is that there are almost no ways to express respect for or distinction between people. We never had a noble class, and that was about all the English language had to make distinctions between people. And in the past few decades, we have become more lax about all sorts of social protocols.
ReplyDeleteSo whenever we end up in another culture, there are all sorts of little nuances that we suddenly have to learn as we place ourselves in society.