The Sun-Herald

My night as a Frenchwoman

This week I found myself on a boat with 500 Europeans from the various Sydney chambers of commerce. Now there's a small-talk challenge.

To help us cross cultural barriers everyone wore a badge with their national flag on it. I wore a French one, partly because the French Chamber had invited me and also to make more friends. Wearing the English flag, I've often found, can be the social equivalent of an impenetrable stutter and tends to result in weather dialogue, laboured jokes about sport or - among fellow ex-pats - musings on the best road route from Birmingham to Hastings. In short, we English are not widely considered the life and soul of the party and in international social gatherings English-ness is something best concealed, like your bum crack.
So, disguised as French people, my friend and I roamed the vessel. Introductions were easy thanks to the labels (I'm now an advocate of name and flag badges for all social events. Imagine it - no more 'do you know who I am?') and as we mingled it struck me not only that people love talking to alleged Frenchwomen, but also that our lack of a common language was an advantage, not a barrier. You tend to skip the small-talk and cut straight to the point. To make yourself understood, you can't avoid speaking clearly and candidly, you think about what you're trying to say rather than the social niceties and you listen properly, too. Communication becomes beautifully candid and succinct.
It made me think about my friend Stewart, who likes his women the way he likes his cars: imported from Europe. His girlfriends never speak much English, and Stewart's foreign language abilities are confined to ordering drinks and asking where the toilets are.
I asked him recently how he manages. Isn't male-female communication challenging enough, what with men and women coming from different planets, one sex able to read maps but not park cars and all those other obstacles described in mating manuals about talking to each other?
Stewart was frank. "It levels the verbal playing field," he said. "I've been out-argued by women too many times. I seem to have more success with ones who don't know 20 English words for 'upset.'
Ah, minimalist compatibility. I remember it well, from a long-ago and completely superficial encounter with an Italian waiter on holiday. He spoke no English whatsoever and my sparse Italian, acquired from childhood piano lessons, consisted solely of phrases like 'fast,' 'slow', 'softly' and 'smoothly'. This vocabulary, as you'd expect, suited the nature of that relationship perfectly.
The problem with some languages is they're pretty enough to make even a cretin appear eloquent. I'm still saddened by the discovery that although his voice is pure poetry, and he has the face and body of a Roman statue, my favourite Italian soccer star is considered a dim-witted peasant by his compatriots. My waiter was probably the same. But it's easy to overlook someone's defects if his every mumble sounds like opera.
In today's over-complicated mating game, no shared language could be a serious relationship asset - not just for pragmatic blokes like Stewart, but for we women, too. Instead of agonizing over what a man really meant by "I'll call you," you can wonder if that's what he said at all or if he was just trying to tell you the name of his dog. Without the language skills to infer, conceal or over-analyse, you remove a whole layer of complexity from your dating dialogue. And if you say something you later regret, you can just tell your partner you meant something else entirely and blame the idiosyncracies of the English language. It's a bit like blaming booze, but more sophisticated.
It's strange, how once you start pondering a subject, it pops up everywhere. After speaking to Stewart I read a newspaper report saying the average woman has a vocabulary of 23,000 words, twice as large as the average man's. Also, the part of men's brains ruling speech gets blocked towards nightfall and their verbal ability falters. It seems that neurology, rather than beer, is to blame for all those stunted conversations in bars after dark. And with that handicap I guess you can't blame a bloke for wanting to level the playing field.