Two stupid things French people do
So there’s these two things that French people do, which we notice from the outside but they have no clue about.
| The French… | The rest of the (western) world… |
|---|---|
… write their family name in ALL CAPS. Hello, this is Jean MARTIN. Talking to Marie DUPONT about François HOLLANDE. Originally done by government administrations and large business organizations, this has trickled down to most of French society. This silliness makes the game “Spot the French on LinkedIn” just too simple. |
… writes names simply capitalized; Barack Obama and Angela Merkel chatting online about Willem-Alexander van Oranje-Nassau, King of the Netherlands and Elizabeth Windsor, Queen of the Commonwealth do not need to hold their shift key pressed all the time. |
… write every punctuation sign composed of two elements (colon, semicolon, guillemets, exclamation mark, etc) separated from the previous word with a space. From « Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir ? » to « la question du jour : espace ou pas d’espace ? » the French really like to make their text more vacuous than it would already be otherwise. And for added insanity, this does not apply to one-element punctuation! |
… writes all punctuation with a consistent and simple amount of spacing: no space before, one space after, and no extra spacing around quotes. |