Je parle comme je suis: ce que nos mots nous disent de nous by Julie Neveux

Abstract

Reviewed by: Je parle comme je suis: ce que nos mots nous disent de nous by Julie Neveux Chloe Mais Hagen Neveux, Julie. Je parle comme je suis: ce que nos mots nous disent de nous. Grasset, 2020. ISBN 978-2-246-82173-1. Pp. 293. In this lexical exploration, Neveux offers a window into twenty-first-century French society and invites us—the reader and assumed native French speaker in France—to reflect on the words we use and what they reveal about our lives. Neveux contends that our language “nous tend un miroir plus réaliste que ne le fait le selfie” and allows us to form conclusions on the changing state of the world around us (286). Her conversational, tongue-in-cheek narration mixes literary, linguistic, philosophical, and pop culture references with personal observations in an informal, broadly accessible work that distills complex social issues into bitesized lexical entries. The book is organized in eight chapters structured around a hundred lexical entries on themes ranging from technology and ecology to emotions and social connectivity. For example, the chapter “Les mots de l’homme-machine: être ou ne plus être humain” laments our growing overreliance on technology, to which we risk losing our sense of self (17). The chapter “Vrai ou fake? La crise de confiance” unpacks such terms as le fact-checking and troll(er) that polarize or lead us to question the nature of truth (211). A typical lexical entry is several pages long, describes a new word or phrase that has gained prominence in France in the past several decades, traces its etymology, gives examples in context, and addresses the often-consequential social implications of its use. As a linguist of English, Neveux is uniquely positioned to trace the etymology of loan words into French from English such as story and date, which originally came into English from French. For example, notes Neveux, the reader will be “sans doute très fier d’apprendre que ‘story’”—now reemerging in French as a descriptor of status updates on Snapchat or Instagram—came into English from the Old French “estoire” (149). Although at times emphasizing the playfulness and richness of the living French language and inviting readers to draw inspiration from it, Neveux’s frank and honest writing can come across as insensitive, especially when writing about terms linked to race or gender. The tone of the book is open, philosophical, and humorously cynical as it laments how the use of certain lexical terms, such as fake news, smombie, and like(r), disrupt the French language and reflect a cheapening of the human experience. Writing about the word smombie, a neologism derived from combining smartphone and zombie, Neveux notes that “le mot nouveau exprime un rapport à la vie réelle problématique” on both a personal and linguistic level (56). Similarly, Neveux defends written French against the insidious emoji: “le visuel impose une seule image (stylisée et réductrice) [...] nos mots valent toujours plus que leurs images” (77). For readers outside of France, Je parle comme je suis contextualizes and provides insights into popular French opinion on English loan words, current political buzzwords, written and spoken tics, and other innocuous expressions typical of twenty-first-century France. [End Page 264] Chloe Mais Hagen St. Olaf College (MN) Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French