Amuse-Bouche No. 17: My Little Cabbageby Julia Frey(julia.frey@aya.yale.edu)If you learn only one word in French, make it .Sunday night, coming back from the country, everyone’s starving.Philippe: “ (Come to our house and eat potluck). (cabbage soup).”Bénédicte, our local food expert, steps in: “For centuries, (plural, because it could contain several kinds of cabbage) was staple peasant fare in France. If you were lucky, you had a little (fat ham or bacon) to put in it.”Isabelle, banging on the table: “ (Yesss!) (I’m hungry as a wolf) !”François-Noël, our local Christmas expert, intones a children’s carol:Even the three wise men, when famished, ate cabbage soup! While the soup heats, we sip an and ruminate on with its multiple, contradictory, metaphoric meanings.Béné: “When married, on the morning after, they were served . It must work. I’m their fifth (cabbage patch kid). I know in the US, (the stork) brings you. But in France, it drops you into a cabbage. Actually, to be precise, it only delivers (boys) in a cabbage. It serves up in a rosebud.”Phil: “ (cream-puff, i.e., sweetie-pie), is that why your father called you (little tiny cabbage) ?”Isa (ups the ante, puts in her two cents’ worth): “Ben, you were (so cute) wearing (puffy ribbon bows) on the ends of your pigtails. No wonder you were (favorite) .Ben: “ was too to (spoil) anyone.”François-Noël: “ ”Moi: “Aha! Linguistic one-upmanship!” I get out the Dictionnaire Grand Robert, volume H, and summarize. “ : this obscure adjective describes a kind of affectionate ”baby-talk” by adults: using diminutives, or doubling syllables, as in ”.Flip (or is that ?): “ ”Moi: “ (wait a minute!) is not the diminutive of . is a screech owl!”F-N: “But and can be used the same way: ( nice, charming, ). The poet Rabelais invented the compliment ‘’ ”Moi: “Pretty as a beautiful little screech owl? Well, I guess a crying baby is comparable to a screech owl.”The game is on. We dig up expressions with .Béné ( inventing a “” joke): “I hear Dupont was (fired.) Too bad. He expected to stay until he was ready to (retire).” means . The difference is between (to send off, in this case from his position) and (to go willingly). (life can be a bed of cabbages).Moi: ():“Well, at least they didn’t (physically attack him).”Here (singular) refers to a rounded, kickable body part -- head or .Ben: “But he was still (in a bad place) !”The original expression, “,” comes from horse racing. Early racetracks were grassy ovals, surrounded by farmers’ fields. If a horse ran off the track, it could end up literally in the cabbages. There are some wonderful idiomatic synonyms for , meaning messed up, out of it, mentally disoriented: (off track, out of the race), (literally: beside his pumps, his hi-tops; implicit: he’s so off track he’s walking alongside his shoes).Isa: “Now he writes for (a cabbage leaf -- a tabloid).”Béné: “Wait! I’m running out of material.” She gets volume C of the Grand Robert. “OK, (had failed) in banking. When they offered him a journalism job, he thought: (they’re playing head games with me, wasting my time). (I know as much about journalism as I know about staking cabbages)."Isa: “You stake , not cabbages! (old hag) would call you (stupid as a cabbage)!”Bénédicte: “ (Shh!) It’s my story. So how could he ?He asked for a trial run on the rag, and discovered it’s . Now Dupont .”Moi (overwhelmed): ""Bénédicte (patiently): “ To reconcile both goat and cabbage means to hold open contradictory options, be streetwise, play it cool. The English parallel is ‘run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.’ An idiotic person is , but a thing that’s is easy as pie. means to put fat in one’s cabbage, to make a quick buck. But (lamb’s quarters, chenopodium) is not a cabbage at all. It’s a spinach-like weed, mostly eaten by the very poor. Take the expression, , to be a spendthrift. Only a rich person would toss . The poor would eat them. Oh, yeah, and means yellow journalism.”François-Noël, slurring his voice: “.”He’s corrupting "" (a penny is a penny) an expression attributed to Auvergnats, who like my Scottish ancestors, have a reputation for penny pinching.Isa: “This is making me even hungrier! Where’s !Phil: “ Soup’s on! ( )”Isabelle: (holding out her bowl): “ (just a whisper, i.e. a little bit).”Philippe (ladle in hand): “ (from North African Arabic: ) ”© Julia Frey 2009
