“I Have un Gros Ventre.”

I see Moonrat is dipping one of those little furry paws into the deep sparkling waters of Yiddish. Reminds me of one of my own forays into non-Englishdom…

When we first became acquainted, online, in 1991,The Missus and I decided for reasons that probably made sense at the time that we wouldn’t exchange photos until (and of course unless) we’d actually met already.

At the time, The Missus had written a short story whose protagonist, a woman named Alice, was taking French lessons and liked to try out new words and phrases by dropping them at random into conversation. As I recall, The Missus herself either was taking a course in French at the time, or had already taken one and was renewing her interest in the language.

I had never taken French (my high-school and college “foreign language” was Latin). But in my travels somewhere, I think at a bookstore on Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, I’d once picked up a reference book called Harrap’s Slang Dictionary: Anglais-Français/Français-Anglais.

Why that book?

Exhibit A: On the front cover, people at a cartoon cocktail party were saying, in English, things like “One for the road,” “Go jump in the lake,” “It’s my shout,” and “Up yours.”

Exhibit B: On the back cover appeared a mini-quiz, labeled “Test your English slang.” For each of the five English phrases, it offered three possible French phrases — from among which, one was supposed to choose the correct translation. But my eye was caught by the nature of the English phrases:

1. To get tanked up
2. Pull your finger out! (This one cracked me up right there in the bookstore. Loudly.)
3. The grapevine
4. To frame someone
5. A nice bit of stuff

In short: How could I have resisted it?

So anyhow, in one of those random bursts of inspired madness with which people kick-start relationships, The Missus and I started dropping random Frenchisms into our email messages to each other.

Now, besides the complications inherent in any online communication medium, neither she nor I really knew what the hell we were doing. She didn’t “know” French, after all; she had a regular dual-language dictionary, but it provided only literal translations — and was light on idiomatic expressions and slang.

I was even worse off. I had a dual-language dictionary of nothing but idiomatic expressions and slang, yes. But I knew (know) nothing of French vocabulary or grammar.

In constructing my own messages, I might find a phrase like, say, donner de réponses évasives — according to Harrap’s, the French equivalent of the English slang verb [to] stonewall. But I’d be helpless to use this verb phrase in a sentence because I didn’t know a damned thing about French verb forms/conjugations.

Furthermore, the French translations which Harrap’s provided often came with slashes (i.e., virgules: “/” characters) between alternative words and phrases, and used abbreviated forms of pronouns like the English “someone.” I had no idea how to interpret the slash in many cases — did it signify just an alternative word to the immediately preceding word? or one to the entire preceding phrase? As for abbreviated pronouns, forget it. I might reasonably conclude that qn meant someone but would still be generally at a loss for how to use, really use the Harrap’s translation of (say) “to stick up for someone,” to wit, prendre le défense/le parti de qn.

Finally, of course, even if I’d used every word and phrase correctly, it wouldn’t have meant squat to The Missus because she couldn’t translate idiomatic French, only literal French.

In short, it was a case not of the blind leading the blind, exactly — more like the supermyopic leading the blind.

This led to a number of amusing moments, most of which have been lost to the mists of time (and changing magnetic-media formats — they might still be lying around on a 5¼-inch floppy somewhere). The one I do remember, though, was related to that insistence on not exchanging photos.

Even if two parties in an online relationship don’t exchange photos, and don’t — or pretend not to — care at all about the other’s appearance, curiosity is natural.

Back then, for a book I was working on I’d become interested in beers and ales — especially how they were brewed, and especially how they were brewed overseas. This academic/practical interest had certain unsurprising consequences.  I mean, my weight wasn’t out of control or anything but I had picked up maybe an additional inch of girth.

So in an effort to help assuage that curiosity but to do so — or so I thought — in a self-deprecatory but debonair and mildly amusing manner, I consulted Harrap’s.

Yep, there it was:

beer belly n F gros ventre

Simple, right? How could I screw up a two-word phrase? Yet I hadn’t counted on the feverish examination of the French-English dictionary at the other end of the email exchange.

It’s funny, y’know, how you get used to the rhythms of an ongoing email exchange — even back in those 300- and 1200-baud-modem days. The Missus and I were going back-and-forth pretty quickly, about as close to what we now think of as online chatting as was possible using only email.

So when the immediate reaction from the Deep South to news of my gros ventre was an extended silence, a small alarm bell sounded. I told myself, But she’d just been there a moment ago! And then I added, Maybe she had to go out for groceries — yeah, something like that, bet she hasn’t even read that message yet…

But no, she hadn’t gone out for groceries. She was there, all right, reading the text of my email on her screen, looking back and forth from it to her French-English dictionary, trying to decide how to reply.

You see, literally the phrase gros ventre translates as “large belly.” But in this context, gros also can mean “fat” — as can ventre itself.

And that was how The Missus had read it, of course.

A polite few minutes passed before her reply came back to me:

You have a *double fat*?!?

I still laugh at that memory.

_________________

P.S. The photo at the top of this post is of John Astin and Carolyn Jones in a characteristic pose as Gomez and Morticia from television’s 1960s-era The Addams Family. Every now and then, Morticia would drop a French phrase into conversation, which always provoked a near-Pavlovian response from Gomez: “Tish!” he’d exclaim, “You know it drives me wild when you speak French!” And he’d seize her arm, lavishing kisses along its whole length.

P.P.S. While researching the P.S. above, I found a quote from Morticia (speaking to Gomez): “I’ve been yours since that first day you carved my initials in your leg.” Ha!