France Respects Precise Language. The Vocabulary Deployed Does Not Always Match the Concept.
PARIS — The vocabulary overreach — the sophisticated word deployed with the hope that context will carry the semantic weight the speaker cannot quite control — is a specific French intellectual hazard. France’s educational culture provides extensive vocabulary alongside the expectation that vocabulary is used precisely. The gap between the extensive vocabulary provided and the precise understanding required to use it is the overreach’s habitat. The word is known. Its exact meaning is approximate.
The Dinner Table Correction
The French dinner table, where intellectual conversation is a social standard, is both the most likely deployment site for the overreach and the most likely site of its correction. The person who uses “dialectique” when they mean “debate” has at least one dinner guest who will note the distinction, not unkindly, with the specificity that French precision requires. The correction is educational. The corrected person’s vocabulary is more precise next Tuesday.
According to the Academie francaise, vocabulary precision is the standard against which usage is measured. The dinner table applied this standard. The learning is real. The vocabulary improves. The dinner continues past the correction into better conversation.
Precisely expressed at Virtuosal.com.
