The Battle of Midway

through the day.

“Good morning.”

“Good afternoon. It’s 12:16 p.m.”

You know the type — that wry, pedantic smirk. Fack off. English, among other tongues, has turned noon into a change of guard, a hinge-hour demanding we adjust our greeting like a uniform. Compliance is obligatory. There’s no way out of this small tyranny. You can’t say good afternoon at 10:59 without sounding like a millenarian activist, nor good morning at 12:31 without seeming totally lost. Even if we granted ourselves a grace period of thirty civil minutes on either side, we’d still have to check. Correctness has a chokehold on the situation; like dutiful bureaucrats at the Exchequer of Courtesy, we’d still have to snap open our watches and peer down our bespectacled proboscises to select between the two options.

Ah, to speak to the world in French. Bonjour. Et voilà. No need to consult sundial or clock. Whether at dawn or at four in the afternoon, the greeting slips from the mouth with relaxed ease. Even though the Jura – cradle of Swiss watchmaking – is as francophone as Franche-Comté, they didn’t create a linguistic need to check the instruments they perfected. This wasn’t an area of life that they deemed worthy of this level precision; contrast this with some cultures’ excuse for continuing to abuse rectal thermometers. Bonjour does the work of the whole day rather nicely. No one feels shortchanged.

But upon due reflection the French pay for this economy elsewhere. Sentenced to a lifetime of facial labor by vowels that stretch, purse, and pucker their mimetic muscles so strenuously that vocalization is often entirely elided. You can’t sleepface through a day in French; you must get up and go from the get-go.

Come to think of it, maybe I’d rather just check my watch around midday. After all, every language has its battles and mine begins and ends at twelve-oh-something. Once one has crossed safely through that dangerous no-man’s-land between morning and afternoon, it’s possible to sleeptalk your way through the rest of La journée en Anglais.

#grateful