A vowel of a difference

Many thanks to Harry for his blog. No doubt you will be hearing from him again. He is our man for Nod off in Welsh!

While Scotland prepares for the return to school next week, many other of you are probably still packing cases. This is a good time to reflect on the role of that all important object - the phrasebook. I spent 15 years producing phrase books and even now they never cease to fascinate me.

First of all, it is the sheer optimism of both publisher and punter in believing that it could be whipped out from a bag or pocket, the exact topic located, the suitable phrase homed in on, the foreign phrase uttered (in this case, ‘please stop the bus, my child is going to be sick’), all in time to prevent the child in question vomiting all over the other passengers.

Those 15 years, which stretched from the early nineties to the mid-noughties, saw a huge change in the way we communicate. I had mastered the telex just in time to see it superseded by the fax. Then email began to emerge from the ether, dragging the net behind it (or perhaps it should be the other way round). Snapping on the heels of all this, was the mobile. It transformed itself from a brick into a wafer, embedding itself so deeply in our lives that most of us suffer from rigor immobilis should we be parted from it.

All this means that we want to communicate as fast as possible. Banished from the phrase book were meandering questions such as ‘would you be so kind as to tell me how to get to the museum’. It became ‘the museum, please’. And long gone are the days of leisurely travel when you really did need that crucial question ‘will this cheese travel well?’.

Today it is not so much phrases that you need, as step-by-step instructions for how to use an automated petrol pump, an automated ticket-machine, even the automated loo. Often these situations, which seem so familiar, can cause the most angst. Things which were once so simple, like finding a reservation ticket stuck in the back of a train seat, are replaced by overhead electronic messaging going round and round in a loop causing you to panic. I remember the time I stood under one saying to my daughters ‘just wait here, they aren’t going to turn up’, only to look at my ticket and see that they were in fact our seats!

Still, life moves on and phrase books are always handy. I remember an old school friend who au-paired for a Vietnamese family in Paris. When she met the grandmother for the first time, so impressed was she with the old lady’s youthful looks, that she felt compelled to utter the compliment ‘comme vous êtes jaune’. As soon as it left her mouth she froze in horror at that incorrect vowel. Instead of saying‘jeune’ (young), she had said ‘jaune’ (yellow). At least with a phrase book she’d never have found the phrase in time to make such a faux-pas.