Diacritiques

As you probably know, there is a law in France, called “loi Toubon” after the former minister of culture who sponsored it, that requires all product descriptions and adverts (“be they in spoken, written or audio-visual form”) to be in French. If several languages are present (read: if the slogan is in English) the French version has to be at least as prominent, readable, audible, comprehensible as the foreign original.

You probably know as well that this law has been much ridiculed, M. Toubon been nicknamed Mr AllGood (tout=all, bon=good), and that no one really obeys. All over the billboards there are slogans in English with no French translation in sight … except when you look very closely along the edge of a poster.

Then you might be able to decipher some French equivalent, printed in 2 cm high letters on a billboard that measures five metres by three. The opposite of a fig leaf, in a sense.

On the Kitkat bar I ate the other day (“Have a break, have a Kitkat”), it wasn’t the difference in size that got my attention, but the decidedly minimalist approach to the translation problem. Here is a scan of the relevant part of the wrapper.

Language Log brings it to our attention that a hoax might be giving millions of web users the wrong idea about the history and etymology of NYC’s nickname The Big Apple.

The term didn’t in fact originate with an early 19th-century immigrant from France named Eve, who (supposedly) ran a brothel and called the women who worked for her by a name that alluded to the biblical Eve’s fruit. A much more solid argument has been made by Barry Popik. It involves black stable workers from New Orleans and the horse-racing journalist John J. Fitz Gerald, who repeatedly used the word on the pages of the New York Morning Telegraph in the mid-1920s. Barry Popik’s findings are all over his site in little bits and pieces, but Cecil Adams at The Straight Dope conveniently summarises Popik’s research.