Re: OFFTOPIC: What is "francais hexagonal"?

On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, John Cowan wrote:
>
> > I ran into this term, and was mystified: obviously "hexagonal
> > (six-sided?) French" is not a useful translation.
>
That's how other have said. 'L'Hexagone' is the word used by the media, politicians
and economists to refer to France trerritory without the DOM-TOM. It's also
called 'la Metropole'. You may not notice it right away when you come here but
when I came back to France after staying for years in Japan I've realized
French are quite cut from the rest of the world in their mind. It's very
centralised, the State is a kind of god with Enarques and X engineers as
great-priests. Europe will be ok as long as they think they can rule it.
Hexagone is a nicely regular, symetrical shape. During the Revolution, it was
planned to be divided into 100 neat squares and time was to be divided into 10
months and weeks into 10 days and hours into 100 minutes. In the xixth century
French deliberately stopped speaking their own hundreds local languages 'for
the Nation's sake' and eagerly told their children to learn well and only the
Nation's Language. And here was French the only language a centur!
y !
!
!
later. The funny thing is that French think they're SO individualistic and rebellous ;-)
Mathias


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