Now that Roland Garros is over, everyone has been talking about the European Cup football tournament.Not familiar with Roland Garros? It's the stadium where the French Open is played, and the proper name of the tournament. Well, to be precise, the truly proper name is Les Internationaux de France de Roland Garros.
It might be the real name, but to me it's just another example of the French using alternate names for places and events.
Have you ever flown into Roissy? That's the cool French name for the Charles de Gaulle airport. Roissy (WAH-see) is the name of the small village that the airport is technically located in. If you talk about Charles de Gaulle, you could be referring to any number of things named after the famous general, so "Roissy" is what they use for the airport.
"Beaubourg" is the alternate name for the modern art museum, known to most non-Parisians as the Pompidou Centre. I guess Beaubourg is the name of the medieval neighborhood that was torn down to make way for the museum. And anyone cool uses the old name.Anyway, back to the European Cup. For the past few weeks, there have been football (soccer) games on tv every night. David is beside himself with happiness. We watch games almost every night, which - as you can imagine - takes up most of our evenings. I'm behind in housework, blogging, and calligraphy practice.
Sadly, England didn't qualify for the tournament this year (it seems that English football teams are like American baseball teams: rarely made up of nationals), so David chose to support Holland. You'd think we'd support France, but their team is pretty lame.
Well Holland was knocked out last night by Russia, so now Dave prefers Germany and I like Spain. Which also tells you a lot about us.
Spain just beat Italy tonight in a shootout, so it seems I won't be getting many chores done again this week.
Alors :
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, let me thank you for your alternate point of view that allows me to wonder about things I took for granted for years. I read your note yesterday and I needed some more research before I could comment it.
- Roland Garros: the proper name is « Internationaux de France de Roland Garros », French Open being the generic English name according to Wikipédia.
- CDG : More than the fact the airport opened before the death of De Gaulle [in 1962 ! And it was not the first French airport ! Texans will never believe that :þ], I think this tendency of calling it Roissy more than Charles De Gaulles is because Roissy is shorter and we LOVE to use the shortest possible words as we can speak even faster.
- Beaubourg caused the biggest question to me. It looks like it was the name of the huge parking lot standing here till 1971 [you can see it in this INA video, coming itself from the name of a village absorbed by Paris under Philippe-Auguste (1165-1223). Basically the project, launched in 1971, was supposed to be named Centre Beaubourg when it'd open in 1977, but Georges Pompidou died in 1974 so they gave it his name as he was the initiator of the project.
I wonder how many people in Detroit keep calling the Fillmore Theater « State Theater » :D
- Oh and yes, we suck at football. Badly.