Tragic Effle
« previous post | next post »
In "Vintage Effle" (12/18/2003) I linked to "the Effle Page, which introduces a useful word for the pseudo-language of many phrase books", and informs us that
The playwright Eugene Ionesco wrote a complete play in Effle, The Bald Prima Donna, the product of his experience of learning English from a textbook in 1950. He actually wrote the play in French, but it shows its origins clearly when translated back into English.
Futility Closet for New Year's Eve 2024 offer the English side of a phrase list from Collins' Pocket Interpreters: France (1937 edition), observing that
James Thurber, who came upon the book in a London bookshop, described it as a “melancholy narrative poem” and “a dramatic tragedy of an overwhelming and original kind.” “I have come across a number of these helps-for-travelers,” he wrote, “but none has the heavy impact, the dark, cumulative power of Collins’.
Here's the English side of that phrase list, taken from Thurber's work My World — And Welcome to it, as quoted in Futility Closet:
I cannot open my case.
I have lost my keys.
I did not know that I had to pay.
I cannot find my porter.
Excuse me, sir, that seat is mine.
I cannot find my ticket!
I have left my gloves (my purse) in the dining car.
I feel sick.
The noise is terrible.
Did you not get my letter?
I cannot sleep at night, there is so much noise.
There are no towels here.
The sheets on this bed are damp.
I have seen a mouse in the room.
These shoes are not mine.
The radiator doesn’t work.
This is not clean, bring me another.
I can’t eat this. Take it away!
The water is too hot, you are scalding me!
It doesn’t work.
This doesn’t smell very nice.
There is a mistake in the bill.
I am lost.
Someone robbed me.
I shall call a policeman.
That man is following me everywhere.
There has been an accident!
She has been run over.
He is losing blood.
He has lost consciousness.
Boing Boing, linking to the Futility Closet post, asks
Is Collins' Pocket Interpreters: France (1937 edition) the most pessimistic phrasebook ever published? What was meant as a practical tool for British tourists instead became an accidental masterpiece of travel anxiety literature, suggesting that a trip to France was less about seeing the Eiffel Tower and more about navigating a gauntlet of pickpockets, stalkers, and blood loss.
And adds:
The book's phrases progress like scenes from a psychological thriller. It starts innocently enough with minor inconveniences before spiraling into increasingly dire situations, spiraling into a chronicle of mounting despair.
The (English) Wikipedia article on Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice Chauve) describes the play's origin and interpretation this way:
The idea for the play came to Ionesco while he was trying to learn English with the Assimil method. Impressed by the contents of the dialogues, often very sober and strange, he decided to write an absurd play named L'anglais sans peine ("English without toil"). Other possible titles which were considered included Il pleut des chiens et des chats, ("It's raining cats and dogs", translated in French literally);[4] "L'heure anglaise"[5] and "Big Ben Follies".
Its actual title was the result of an error in rehearsal by actor Henri-Jacques Huet: the fire chief's monologue initially included a mention of "l'institutrice blonde" ("the blonde schoolteacher"), but Huet said "la cantatrice chauve", and Ionesco, who was present, decided to re-use the phrase.
[…]
Like many plays in the theatre of the absurd genre, the underlying theme of The Bald Soprano is not immediately apparent. Many suggest that it expresses the futility of meaningful communication in modern society. The script is charged with non sequiturs that give the impression that the characters are not even listening to each other in their frantic efforts to make their own voices heard. There was speculation that it was parody around the time of its first performance, but Ionesco states in an essay written to his critics that he had no intention of parody, but if he were parodying anything, it would be everything.
It should be obvious that "effle" comes from the acronym EFL = "English as a Foreign Language", though the genre points in both directions — Ionesco's phrases came from a book to help French speakers with English, whereas Thurber's examples came from a book for British travelers in France.
S Frankel said,
January 8, 2025 @ 5:59 pm
I once came across an Icelandic phrase book that had a section "On the train." There have never been any trains in Iceland. One sentence was: "When do we reach the frontier?"
AntC said,
January 8, 2025 @ 6:17 pm
actual title was the result of an error in rehearsal … a mention of "l'institutrice blonde" …, but Huet said "la cantatrice chauve" …
I'm probably going to reveal my ignorance of rehearsal practices within "the theatre of the absurd genre", but that error isn't a slip of the tongue or a soundalike. A thinko? I'm not sure even (say) the Goons or Monty Python would twist a phrase that far.
Mark Liberman said,
January 8, 2025 @ 6:28 pm
@AntC: "I'm probably going to reveal my ignorance of rehearsal practices within "the theatre of the absurd genre", but that error isn't a slip of the tongue or a soundalike. A thinko?"
Maybe the list of phrases that the actor had to memorize included a set of head nouns that included "cantatrice", and a set of following adjectives that included "chauve", and a set of random-seeming combination patterns, causing the actor to get confused and mix them up?
[Later] No, I don't think that it — here's the ASSiMIL L'Anglais san peine text itself… Though maybe the play involved some mad-libs-style generation of new texts like those on pp. 171-174?
Philip Taylor said,
January 8, 2025 @ 6:41 pm
I find it interesting that when, some years (decades) ago, I was called on to teach English as a Foreign Language to a group of Czech students at Velehrad, I decided (with the agreement of the course organisers) to jettison the set text and instead to teach through the medium of rôle play — the very first exercise that I set was for the students to arrive in Great Britain, seek to purchase a railway ticket from a machine, and find that the machine had neither dispensed the required ticket nor returned their money. Their task was to explain this to someone in authority. Lines 1 to 6 of the above text really brought that exercise to mind once again.
AntC said,
January 8, 2025 @ 7:43 pm
(Thank you @myl.)
I note the absence of instructatrixes. There is dancing, circuses, dining-out, Mozart, Shakespeare. I see no singing nor singers … until page 141: My daughter wants to become a singer. She has the best voice in her school, and she likes to sing. (No mention of her coiffure, though.) Sound advice for all parents: Marry your son when you will, but your daughter when you can.
@PT Lines 1 to 6 …
Contrast the text itself's Line 1 is "My tailor is rich."[**] A phrase I have reached for when travelling … never; neither in any country I have lived in. I hope your instruction was this effective:
Ah, yes. The only-ten-minutes-a-day of every New Year's resolution Youtube advert.
[**] The pronunciation guide had me in stitches, even remembering this is pigeon-French-spelling: maï tée'lë iz ritch.
Victor Mair said,
January 8, 2025 @ 7:47 pm
effle
Verb
efflē
second-person singular present active imperative of effleō
< effleo Etymology From ex- (“out of”) + fleō (“weep”). Verb effleō (present infinitive efflēre, perfect active efflēvī, supine efflētum); second conjugation (of eyes) to exhaust by weeping, weep out
jaap said,
January 9, 2025 @ 4:41 am
I have a 1918 French phrase book that was donated to American soldiers who went off to fight in WW1. It is rather darkly humourous to read all those phrases that the soldiers would never ever get the opportunity to use. These include a translations of "The captain fell off his horse" and "Paris is as beautiful as Chicago", and phrases for ordering a rare steak at a restaurant and pointing out an error in the bill.
I've scanned it and put it on the internet archive:
https://archive.org/details/frenchphrase2
Philip Taylor said,
January 9, 2025 @ 5:42 am
« Elle n'exige pas a travail ardu. L'essentiel est d'y consacrer régulièrement au moins dix minute par jour. La méthod a extrêmement souple at s'adapte au tempérament de chacun » — I am pleased to say that the organisers of the Velehrad summer schools allowed considerably more time than ten minutes per day — if I recall correctly (this was 1993, or thereabouts) the day started promptly at 09:00, continued until lunch at 13:00, the students then bolted down their meals in ten minutes flat (at which point I was just finishing my soup), the afternoons were devoted to sports (occasionally accompanied by first aid), then a further meal after which back to work for the remainder of the evening. I arrived at about 18:00 on my first day (I had just driven from Warszawa, a total distance of maybe 600km), asked what I would talk about that evening, and after a brief pause for thought said "The accents of British English". My talk started with the words "You have been probably been told (or inferred) that English is a single language — I will try to illustrate how wrong this idea is".
Mark Liberman said,
January 9, 2025 @ 5:44 am
@jaap:
Definitely some dramatic possibilities, e.g.
Philip Taylor said,
January 9, 2025 @ 5:55 am
Unconvinced by their rendering of "You make me sick" as Vous me rendez malade — would not Vous me dégoutez perhaps be more idiomatic in this context ?
almin7a said,
January 9, 2025 @ 7:52 am
This is wild! Those old phrasebooks are accidentally hilarious and terrifying. Ionesco's The Bald Soprano makes so much more sense now. It's like the dark side of language learning, a reminder that communication is way more than just memorizing phrases. Kind of makes you appreciate how important real understanding is, especially in fields like business, where you need more than a phrasebook to succeed. Anyone interested in that should definitely check out what goes into a good business administration program, like the details here: https://almin7a.com/what-is-business-administration/.
cameron said,
January 9, 2025 @ 9:52 am
The 1847 Edition of The Handbook of Travel Talk in English, German, French, and Italian by John Murray is a rich source of Effleisms, and it may be the source of the apocryphal "my postillion has been struck by lightning" because, while it does not include that very phrase, it does mention postillions quite a bit, and various other misfortunes that they might suffer
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Handbook_of_Travel_talk/NUPvkzjutR4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=JOhn+Murray+Handbook+of+travel+talk&printsec=frontcover
Robert Coren said,
January 9, 2025 @ 10:24 am
When I was growing up (1950s-60s), our household had an already-decades-old Larousse Petit Illustré, a more or less standard French dictionary. There was a section on common phrases, most of them French, but a few borrowed from English, and the latter were accompanied by a French approximation of their pronunciation; I don't actually remember any of them, but I know that our family found them all hilarious.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
January 9, 2025 @ 11:34 am
But, what if one's hovercraft _is_ actually full of eels?
Allan from Iowa said,
January 9, 2025 @ 12:17 pm
Cross this genre with extraterrestrial travel, and you have "Useful Phrases for the Tourist" by Joanna Russ (previously mentioned in comments here or more likely at Languagehat).
Michael Watts said,
January 9, 2025 @ 1:58 pm
For a noun derived from this, I assume you'd want neuter plural efflēta, "[words] that have been wept out", though mostly this brings to mind the already extant English word effluvia.
David Morris said,
January 9, 2025 @ 2:23 pm
I have used Youtube videos of 'slow, easy listening in Korean' and some of the examples are weirdly specific. I can't remember the name of the channel or any of the examples. I'll search later.
David Morris said,
January 9, 2025 @ 3:09 pm
I couldn't immediately find the Youtube channel I was thinking about, but I found one of my own blog posts with links to various resources. The first linked channel is now inoperative, so maybe it was that one. Another channel has a section on problems and crime.
Mark Liberman said,
January 9, 2025 @ 3:26 pm
@AntC: "I note the absence of instructatrixes."
There are quite a few teachers, though, of all genders — for example
Our new teacher, Mr. Wells, often takes us for a walk in the woods in the afternoon, when it is too hot in the play-ground.
Yesterday one of the boys got lost in the woods, and we could not find him for more than an hour.
So you see a whistle is very useful, if one gets lost.
or
Isn't he engaged to a London girl?
Yes, he is. She is a music teacher.
They hope to get married shortly.
Have you ever seen her?
I saw her once with him; I happened to meet them in the street, not far from
my office.
How did you like her?
They were in a hurry ; he introduced me, we hardly exchanged a few words.
Is she pretty?
And among the many non-instructional dramatic passages Ionesco seems to have missed, we have
Why do you refuse to dance with Helen?
It is too dangerous : she smokes, and I have a celluloid collar.
or
What do you recommend, boiled eggs or an on1elette?
Do not take take boiled eggs, they are not fresh. Have an omelette: there are no eggs in it.
[For which they note that "what" is pronounced "houott"…