When in Rome

October 30, 2006

Having spent most of the summer lost in a great guttural fog of Swiss German, it’s been nice to pass some time in Lausanne, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Here, for the first time in months, the spoken word has supplanted the ringing cowbell as the most lucid and comprehensible noise in my immediate environment, and umlauts no longer hover like thunderclouds over every sign and billboard.

But this isn’t to say that life in a francophone environment doesn’t hold some interesting linguistic surprises. Upon arriving here, for example, I learned that I wasn’t in French Switzerland, as I’d always thoughtlessly termed it, but rather Roman Switzerland. Likewise, the people I saw around me turned out not be called Pseudo-Frogs at all: they are the Roman Swiss, or just plain Romans for short. This seemed strange at first, and, if truth be told, still does. This very morning, the cover of the newspaper bore a picture of a bratty-looking teenage Genevoise, whose chief claim to fame appeared to be her unilateral declaration that she was “the Roman Paris Hilton!!!” (a desperate shortage of newsworthy material being the price Switzerland pays for its harmonious clockwork society). Was she right to slam the door shut on the legions of bratty-looking teenage Italians who coveted the same title, and seemingly had a much better claim to it? Apparently, yes.

As mere alien residents in Lausanne, Deborah and I don’t count as Romans, but we learned recently that we qualify for an even better label. While filling out a form for the Bureau of Immigration, we discovered that, in the eyes of the Swiss state, we two are naught but concubines living in a state of concubinage. This, apparently, is the term the entire French-speaking world uses to describe non-married couples who live together, perhaps because harlotage lacked sufficient exotic flavour. To be fair, it’s true that this sense of the word concubine exists in English as well – indeed, the Random House Unabridged Dictionary lists it as the first definition. But that doesn’t change the fact that the next listed meaning is “a woman residing in a harem and kept, as by a sultan, for sexual purposes,” nor that Roget’s New Millennium Thesaurus offers floozy, strumpet, tart, and good old-fashioned prostitute as plausible synonyms. Nonetheless, I’m very much looking forward to integrating this word into my day-to-day conversations when I get back to Canada. “This is my concubine Deborah,” I will announce to friends and relatives. “Ah yes,” I’ll smile reassuringly at their confusion. “Didn’t I tell you before? We’ve been living in a state of concubinage for some time now.”

Anyway, what the hell does the Random House Unabridged Dictionary know? The fools actually define the word Roman as “of or pertaining to the city of Rome.”