Home is where the heart is (at)
And, now, the final chapter of our European vacation …
We started on the Orient Express. Well, that’s how the travel agent billed it, though try as I might I never found Hercule Poirot.
My husband, Brian, and I took a train ride through the Swiss Alps. Large lakes and churches were dwarfed by the even larger mountains. We sped by Mount Pilatus, where legend has it Pontius Pilate was buried. We arrived in Zurich, the one city on the trip whose language I’d never Duolingoed. Pointing and gesturing got us on Rail Europe to France. We arrived in Paris late. As we hailed a taxi to go to our hotel, a soft mist turned the city into an Impressionist painting.
The next morning, we traveled to the Palace of Versailles, mighty in its own artistry, but when we came upon the sculpture “The Rape of the Sabine Women,” we remembered seeing the larger original in Rome. Or was it Florence?
Not all journeys end, but a vacation does. At some point, on any holiday, I click my sneakers and say, “There’s no place like home.” It’s not like I didn’t love Italy, the Vatican, Switzerland and France; it’s that I thought I’d get more rest at home. I wouldn’t have to fight my circadian rhythm. And I had grown tired of conjugation.
That night, we walked to the Latin Quarter. I used up the last of my French in a restaurant named Le Petit Prince de
Paris. It served as a tavern in 1450 and took on its current name in 1976. Candlelight flickered in framed mirrors. Wooden staircases went nowhere. It was a comfy hobbit’s den of an eatery.
Edwin, our waiter, brought an amusebouche: olives and cheese. I stumbled through the menu to order Filet de Boeuf au Roquefort for my husband and Magret de Canard for myself, and we tasted the best meal of our journey. Edwin, knowing an American tipper when he saw one, even flirted with us as Brian sipped his port.
France is super protective of its language. In 1635, Cardinal Richelieu established the Académie Française, with a mission to preserve the native tongue.
In 1992, when terms like “le weekend” and “le hamburger” had crept into use, the French passed a constitutional amendment declaring: “The language of the Republic is French.” The government even fined one company 500,000 euros for providing software in English only.
On the street level, this translates to the French insisting I try to speak French, but rolling their eyes when I confused it with my junior high school Spanish and my Italian tutoring. They wouldn’t help me out of a
plus que parfait but, still, no matter how I garbled
deux verres de vin blanc, the waiters brought white wine.
Still, it was nice to get on that Air France jet and know I wouldn’t have to wonder where to put the adverbs anymore. Twelve hours later we landed in San Francisco to the wonderful chaos that is America and its language, where, apparently, I can now put a preposition anywhere I damn please.
That week, Emily Brewster, an associate editor at MerriamWebster, announced that “a preposition is a perfectly appropriate kind of word to end a sentence with.” Somewhere in a cemetery in Queens, there is a grave that Sister Mary Florence, my fourth-grade teacher, rolled in. But I myself was tickled.
The ban on sentenceending prepositions was born in 1672, when John Dryden critiqued Shakespeare for ending his sentences that way. He thought this wrong because Latin did not allow for this construction. English teachers have been enforcing this ever since.
But American English is not Latin. It’s not even really English. We don’t have the Academy American to enforce structure. We live, in fact, in a Wild West of language. Not sure if I accept Emily Brewster as an authoritative source, but I applauded her in that she understood that our language is a polyglot, borrowed from French, German and what have you. We don’t have rigid rules, but rather suggestions, and a good writer knows when to split that infinitive. We can argue all day about the Oxford comma, but we recognize it’s as arbitrary as the Notre Dame exclamation point!
We got home to a language I knew. I kissed the ground of the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior in a city that translates whatever you please into Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin or Cantonese. Frank may have its faults — linguistically and otherwise — but it’s the town I have made my home in.
Kevin Fisher-Paulson’s book “Secrets of the Blue Bungalow” (Fearless Books, $25) is available at fearlessbooks.com and area bookstores.
We don’t have rigid rules, but rather suggestions, and a good writer knows when to split that infinitive.