Percentages, to remember, French labour disputes

Percentages seem to be on the move. One in 10 is the new 10%. The Mirror of 20th May ran the following: “one in seven of all card transactions are now contactless, compared with one in 16 a year ago”. Is this more dumbing down? I must admit to knowing quite a few people for whom percentages are a complete mystery, but I’m not sure if one in 16 is easier to comprehend than 6.25% or a little over 6%.

The French seem to be doing something similar but are also using fractions. This doesn’t seem to be dumbing down because, as you can see in the following quote, they’re using all three methods; not bad really, or are they just confused in their sub-editing: “Près des 2/3 des hommes appartiennent au groupe 1 et 1/3 au groupe 2. Pour les femmes, le groupe 1 rassemble une femme sur deux et l'autre moitié se répartit de façon à peu près équilibrée entre le groupe 2 et le groupe 3. Qu'a donc de si particulier ce groupe 3, dans lequel les hommes n'entrent pas, et qui est loin d'être négligeable puisqu'il concerne près d'une femme sur quatre (23%)?’’

I may give the impression that English is undergoing rapid change in isolation. Not so. French is also changing; the old normative grammar, which used to be so powerful, is under threat. For example, traditionally the French have always made the distinction between “je me rappelle cette personne” and “je me souviens de cette personne”, both meaning “I remember this person”, but there is a grammatical difference, the first uses a direct object, the second an indirect object. Nowadays, it’s very common to hear: “je me rappelled DE cette personne”; it seems that people can’t remember or are not bothered about this difference. But there is an underlying reason. If you want to say to someone: “do you remember me?”, “tu te souviens de moi? Is fine, but you can’t use “se rappeler” in this example, it just won’t work. “Tu te rappelles moi?” or “Tu te me rappelles?” are both not possible, but “Tu te rappelles de moi?” does work, or rather it doesn’t if you want to be grammatical about it. This difficulty is quite clearly described by Maurice Grevisse in his Le Bon Usage, the definitive French grammar, first published in 1936. It’s therefore an old problem which people tut about today as if it were new. It’s worth noting that despite the Académie being Française, Maurice Grevisse was a Belgian grammarian.

In France, the new law aiming to modernise employment legislation, has developed into a real battle with the unions. Refineries are mostly blocked by demonstrators and fuel supplies are not getting through to garage forecourts. There is a very serious risk that the national economy will soon be brought to a standstill. Outsiders find it difficult to understand why such modest changes could lead to this kind of combative reaction. The unions, with possibly one exception, are similar to those in Britain some forty years ago, won’t be pushed about and always ready for a fight. French labour law, in the shape of the Code du Travail, has always given them clout, they have always punched above their weight in defence of their own rights and special interests despite the fact that their membership is nowadays small.

An example of acquis sociaux. Martine Aubry, when Labour Minister in the late 1990s, gave her name to a law which limited the working week to 35 hours. Her theory was that this would lead to a need to hire more people. It didn’t work out like that and no other country in Europe followed France’s example. It is now generally held to be holding back the economy and it is proving extremely difficult to get the unions to budge on this and to move towards a longer working week. Another current issue, Sunday working. The unions are reluctant to sign up to it and because of the way negotiations are structured, nobody seems to ask the shop-workers for their opinion. 

Queue, bunch, more French labour law

Linguistically speaking, what’s been exercising me this week? I think it must be “first responders”. I must apologise to my American friends for picking on American expressions, but there are an enormous number of words and expressions which are queuing up waiting to be used by speakers of British English. First responders have always been called emergency services just as train stations have always been called railway stations or simply stations.

These usages are quite noticeable. President Obama recently said in support of Prime Minister Cameron’s position on staying in the EU that, when it came to negotiating trade terms, Britain would go to the back of the queue if it chose Brexit. The President said queue instead of the more usual American choice of line. There was much jumping up and down, shouting and gesticulating by his British audience of vote leavers who said that his speech must have been written by Downing Street as his own White House speech writers would never have said that. See how important the choice of words can be? Although I wouldn’t build a court case on that evidence alone!

That’s quite a light-weight example when compared to the following: "borrow a bunch of money and undertake a bunch of big investment projects" Mathew Yglesias, Vox.com 11.05.16.  I don’t know whether the writer was joking but I tend to think not. Can people really say or write things like that in real life? It makes me think of the tweet ascribed to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth: There is no such thing as 'American English'. There is English and there are mistakes. (Elizabeth Windsor on Twitter). Language is to be taken seriously!

I have to keep reminding myself that tourism was much frowned upon in the 1950s and that typewriter for many years referred to the person who operated the machine before giving way, probably owing to the confusion or amusement that ensued.

In France, violence, particularly involving young students, continued this week in reaction to the proposed changes to labour law practices. Lacking the necessary support, the law has had to be forced through the National Assembly by the use of Article 49.3 of the Constitution, what in Britain would be a decree or a statutory instrument and what American legislators call an executive order. The new law is a watered-down version of what the government needed to do which is basically lower unemployment and increase productivity. But, as General de Gaulle said: Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux cent quarante-six variétés de fromage? – how do you govern a country that has more than 246 different cheeses?

For the people on the streets and the unions this is a matter of les acquis sociaux, the collective rights that workers have obtained often by social conflict and which they will not give up. This term, in the form of les acquis, is in common use in Brussels in the administration of the EU. France has two main economic structural problems its governments have never been able to get on top of. Sovereign debt, no government budget has been in balance since 1974. Unemployment since 1980 has rarely fallen below 8%; it is currently over 10%, close to the European average. Unemployment in Britain, USA, Holland, Germany is around 5%. In France, unemployment among the young, 15 to 25 year-olds, is pushing 25%. Despite these extremely worrying figures, there is still great resistance to change. People still want to be civil servants and have a job protected for life or, if they can’t work in the public sector, they still want a job for life. All this against a back-drop of unions and others who keep warning: “don’t accept any change to employment law, this is the bosses trying to dupe you; they want to abolish the 35-hour week, they want you to work longer hours for less pay; they want to be able to sack you more easily when it suits them.” Both sides are spinning like mad. One thing is sure – it’s high time things changed, and for the better.

Correcting other people’s grammar

On April 20, Monica Chalabi, The Guardian’s data editor opined that correcting people’s bad grammar is racist. Before you ask, I don’t know what a data editor is. I wondered idly if there was anything one can do nowadays which is acceptable or permitted by law. Until now, it hadn’t occurred to me that making disobliging remarks about someone’s lack of mastery of language was in any way commonplace. Just shows you how wrong you can be. But, surely this is just someone goading us, engaging in the present-day sport of dumbing-down? The OED defines this as: to simplify or reduce the intellectual content of, especially, published or broadcast material in order to make it appealing or intelligible to a larger number of people.

Paul Joseph Watson of InfoWars and Chris Menahan, of Information Liberation, take her to task.

Apparently, according to Monica Chalabi, grammar rules were invented by wealthy white people and therefore non-whites should be free to ignore them without being criticized.

“The people pointing out the mistakes are more likely to be older, wealthier, whiter, or just plain academic than the people they’re treating with condescension,” states Chalabi. “All too often, it’s a way to silence people and that’s particularly offensive when it’s someone who might already be struggling to speak up,” she adds.

Chalabi argues that rather than correcting bad grammar, people should just shut up and listen.

“We should spend more time listening to what others have to say and less focusing on the grammar what they say it with,” she asserts.

Chalabi claims that wanting a “set of rules we can all understand” is an attitude shared only by “grammar snobs” who “overlook the fact the rules they’re talking about aren’t commonly held at all, they’re just their rules.”

The message is clear says Menahan: ” Don’t strive to improve yourself, accept mediocrity.”

I understand what Menahan is saying, but I’m not sure what Chalabi is trying to say. She believes that grammatical rules are used by wealthy, educated white people to suppress the rights of less well educated non-white people to express themselves and be heard, especially if they are non-native speakers who have an imperfect knowledge of the language, is that it?

Maybe I don’t get around enough, it’s a distinct possibility, but are there people who stop others from speaking by saying things like: “hey, you, your English is rubbish, I can’t understand a word you’re saying. Why don’t you move along and come back when you can speak properly”. Somehow, I think not, unless we’re talking about rallies where public order is likely to break down, or a heated argument in a pub. Correcting other speakers’ grammar is usually a mental process, it’s a reaction, a judgement which is not expressed. Unless among friends and family, to express this openly would be socially unacceptable; normal people just don’t behave like that, I hope.

Chalabi doesn’t like sets of rules that we can all understand. Yet, without rules of some kind, we wouldn’t be able to speak to each other at all or, at least, not efficiently. Without these sets of rules, people wouldn’t be able to learn a foreign language, even. I think I’d better just accept that Chalabi is trying to make a point and, whatever her point, she seems to come into contact with an awful lot of rude people.