French Spoken Here

While I was pondering how I might go about changing some of the "Rules of the Game" of football/soccer, I was reminded that FIFA's name is French, and therefore their governance must also be French. I decided I'd be better off tackling the rule changes through UEFA, Europe's governing body, but again remembered that that acronym stands for a bunch of unpronounceable French words. In desperation, I thought of the International Olympic Committee, whose name, at least, is English. But then I remembered that Olympic soccer/football is meaningless, and largely governed by rules set down by FIFA anyway. At a loss for what to do in order to set right the many ills of the world of professional futebol, I cast about to my many online resources: wikipedia, google, fifa.com, uefa.com, etc. To my great surprise, French is not the exclusive official language of any of the organizations I hope to fix. As it turns out, the only reason that they have French names is because they were originally established by Frenchmen in Paris. Using the French-based acronyms today serves only as a reminder that we owe some small debt of gratitude to those original French founders, and so I have determined not to give up on my quest to revise the rules of the game--in English, the language of the world.

As I was arriving at that conclusion, the good people at the BBC told Firefox that I should consider reading this article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7844192.stm
We all knew that the French hate English, or at least that some people in France have a rabid hatred for and fear of the English language way back when they tried to keep McDonalds from being McDonalds. I have personally never had a problem with a French person, even the intramural soccer team that beat us in the final before the game erupted into a "fight" and the organizers cancelled it--we hung out with those French students for a few hours after the game and had a great time. I have even had great luck in France itself: nobody has ever been rude to me (there are far more people busying themselves by being rude to me here in Spain than there ever could be in France, even in Paris), nor have I been tricked, lied to, robbed, abused, snubbed, etc. by any French people so far as I know. I was forced to eat raw beef in 1993, but that's apparently not an insult in France, it's just how they do. I do have a great distaste for the French national soccer team, but that's because as far back as my short memory goes, they've beaten Portugal 1-0 on a pk in major tournaments. They're probably no more evil than any other national side that has beaten Portugal in competition, right?

Having said all that, the fact remains that there are some people in France who, for lack of a more reliable religious system, have decided that the preservation of the French language in the face of the English onslaught is the greatest good that can be pursued in life. So they have invented "awards" with which they deride their compatriots of less Anglophobia, even going so far as to bring legal charges against French companies that fail to adhere to a strict "French-first" policy. Obviously, there must be a far greater group of pragmatic French people, like the business students from Paris and Toulouse who come to Cincinnati every year to study business and improve their English. There are a number of successful French companies on the international stage, and it seems unlikely to me that these would be able to maintain their success in an exclusively Francophone context--at the end of the day, apples to apples, business people around the world are far more likely to know English than French (or any other language, for that matter). In fact, all the evidence available to me at present suggests that the English language has more than its fair share of supporters in France--the numbers seem closer to those in Portugal (where everyone and his brother knows enough English to get by) than those in Spain (where everyone and his brother admits that one of their major failings is that they have just never buckled down to learn English as well as they should). In that context, I appreciated this quote from Jean-Paul Nerriere in the BBC article, "We're just urinating on the ashes of the fire," because, according to the article, "he says the French have to recognise that the language war is lost." The French need English. Heck, the English, and the rest of Europe, need the French as well, if only so they can keep making those delightful Citroëns and Peugots. I have a friend here whose Citroën is an automatic, and the poor thing shifts like the time my '85 Celica's transmission fluid drained out through the poorly-replaced drain cap. Makes for some excitement pulling into the city's 15 roundabouts...

Oh, in other news, we're going to Andorra in a month, for a very few days. The good people at the Commission here have decided that all the Spain grantees should go to Andorra to celebrate the mid-year conference, and though it seems an odd choice for the Spanish Commission, I can't say I'm not excited to go to Andorra.

I'm sure I have lots more to say, but I'm also right in the middle of rewriting this chapter...