Silly Really

Sometimes my American eyes see funny French things, especially when I’m driving around.

Driving in France, you know you’re entering a town, village or community because a sign announces its name. The sign is also an indication to slow down to 50 km an hour. This village name made me giggle:

Many of the smaller villages don’t have shops anymore. Elders are retired. Young people have moved to cities for work. Slowly, the family-run bakeries, butcher, and artisanal shops have been replaced by supermarkets, whose large surface areas and parking lots only fit on the outskirts. But French people need their bread.

So…now there are vending machines popping up where you least expect them. But when I saw this sign, the first thing that popped into my head was: Pain for sale 24/7. Sounds…painful and not very jolly.

The French adopt English words a lot, especially for branding and marketing. They have a way of spinning a whole world out of an English word that we don’t use in the same way at all. Take “le cocooning” for example. It’s a French term coined around an English word. I’ve seen it used by home decorating companies. Today I saw it used by Yves Rocher, a beauty brand that’s actually really good at marketing. But the way they used the word cocooning made me giggle. I mean, I’ve never seen it used this way before.

P.S. The French word for marketing is marketing.