II.

left to remain silent

…or, a language lesson I never had

Read Part I.

I have always loved the word “autumnal.” It contains two features that just melt me:

➊ A stress-shift from the noun to adjectival form (“adjectival” and “pentagonal” also possess such hermaphroditic liquidity);

➋ the same inflection bringing into sonic presence of the “n,” otherwise obediently mute, the way the subtle topography of benches, curbs, and public squares is made salient by the blanket of a night’s snowfall, or the way different trajectories and alchemies of chlorophyll breakdown result in the fiery spectrum of autumnal foliage. [1]

I never liked “fall.” The word seemed so mediocre in comparison to its older, more intriguing cousin. Fall feels gauche, possessing none of the alacrity of its nearest relative “spring.” Autumn is singular, yet it maintains the unity of the six-lettered seasons. What with its two u’s, it is as red-headed as “August,” a word on a realtor’s calendar I stared at once as a kid for long enough for it to stop making coherent sense. Fall, however, is downed definitively by its lack of adjectival form, despite the potential triple “l” in fall-like—actually, it simply sounds inane. A feeble attempt at qualitative capture. Fall wasn’t thought through. Give me estival, hibernal, vernal, autumnal. There, autumn can hold its own.

[Alexandra Wood, violin; Huw Watkins, piano] ℗ 2012 NMC Recordings

This summer, in the middle of a two-month stint abroad, I spent one glorious week in the Centre region with Philippe and Marie Jo, a pair of septuagenarians who live not only a life I would be happy to live in forty years, but now. On a drive to Chaumont-sur-Loire, while Marie Jo was explaining how typically French (and a bit xenophobic) it is to have their national heritage so poorly “fléché” (“signposted with arrows,” untranslatable as a single word, instantaneously comprehensible if you have experienced a Carrollian French rond-point), she used the phrase “trop ennuyant.” Maybe I never paid attention before, but the punch of the “p,” articulated with her characteristic schoolteacher clarity, which allows for little to no data loss (“high index” French!), knocked me over for a moment. Nearly always absent in the flow of speech, I remembered myself making the caustic error many times of eliding that “p” as a “z” sound (so “troz-ennuyant.”) I learn later, via diligent digital research, this makes me highly uncultivated and suspect. Rather than feeling dismayed, however, I feel vindicated, because someone has given it a name, and as anyone who has searched desperately on WebMD in the hopes of self-diagnosis can attest, a name is half the cure:

Pataquès.

Here are some definitions:

• Wiktionary: “intrusive s” or “intrusive t” (a type of speech error whereby a word-final /t/ or /s/ is pronounced for euphony, though it is not part of the word’s spelling)
• Académie 9 : XVIII^e siècle. Création plaisante imitant les liaisons fautives du type.
• Académie 8 (much harsher) : Faute grossière de langage.

The everyday meaning of it is, in essence, a “social gaffe.” Hot mess.

After a deep dive into the world of French liaisons (not the amorous kind, rather the kind whereby inert end consonants—and there are many—get re-activated in the presence of a following vowel), I learn that “trop” and “beaucoup” are the only words ending in “p” that can liaise with a following vowel. It is all a bit too much. [2]

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The origins of pataquès (and yes, you pronounce the final “s”) date back to the 18^th-century linguist Domergue, who reports a tale of a young man at a theater who, eavesdopping on two press-powdered and immaculately titivated ladies, pulls out a fan and asks them whether it belongs to one of them. “Il n’est poinzzzzzz à moi” says one; “Il n’est patttttt-à-moi” says the other. Mocking them both for their mis-connections, he exclaims, deliberately scrambling his liaison, “ma foi, je ne sais patttttà qu’est-ce !” The joke only works because there is a mismatch of aspiration and education.

Turns out, my lapsus linguae can be further subcategorized as an instance of “velours” (velvet), an erroneous intrusion of a “z” sound, as opposed to a “cuir” (leather), one of a “t” sound. Queer that pataquès contains a “cuir,” and that the “velours” is considered the less sinful of the two; in fact, the French term “c’est du velours” means “to go down smoothly.” But more discomfiting is the assertion that language of higher social classes tends to contain more liaisons, including the crucial, optional ones. Like when “often” is pronounced with a clearly enunciated “t,” even though I had been taught in grade school its “proper” pronunciation was silence—what linguists might mark with a null sign. The so-called “liaisons of prestige” in French betray the speech of higher tenor, though there is no betrayal if the effect is intentional. I surmise it’s got to do with the status of the written, spelled word. Jacques Chirac was known to have appended the liaised consonant so much to the previous word that he added a break between the two words, rendering moot the initial function of the connection.

Pataquès is an error of mapping from orthography onto speech. It is an attempted euphony, there to suture a perceived awkward gap. I make the error likely because I liaise with the “z” so often that the “p” feels so unusual on my lips. Like alcohol, social media, or other analogous vices, pataquès is a default manner of filling the void. Small talk at its most fine-grained. But poor “p.” It seems uncannily a familiar thing to me, to remain silent until called upon, to euphonize a silence, and to be a pawn in raising one’s status. In a pataquès, we get not a late bloomer—a wallflower hitherto silent, coming into her own—but a “wrong bloomer”—a common bindweed that saps her chance at efflorescence. ⫷ [Oct. 16, 2019]

Read Part III.

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[1] “Autumnal” is more striking to me than “columnist,” or “signal,” or “phlegmatic,” or even “damnation.” I’ve learned that these letters are called “inert letters,” meaning an otherwise silent letter is sounded in a cognate word. [2] After researching this, it seems to me this is a “liaison facultative” (optional) but with a high probability of liaising, as opposed to silencing. It’s also taken as being emphatic. [a]

2[a] except in the case of trop aimable—cause it’s too darn lovable.