A girlfriend of mine told me that when her teenage boy says things that are just unfounded or based on random stuff passing through his (otherwise very intelligent) head, she tells him, “When you say that, it makes you sound stupid.”  She provides this feedback with parental concern in her voice, not surliness.

Let’s face it, olfaction is an important sense.  Olfaction is strongly linked to emotion and emotional memories.  The smell of some cookies reminds you of one grandmother, and the smell of “White Shoulders” perfume reminds you of the other grandmother.  

When I first visited Warsaw, in 1985, I learned to mock the Ministry of Culture.  I listened and tried to understand the Poles at that time, and I gathered that the building consolidated in one huge structure everything that the Poles felt about communist rule.  Double lives, underground feelings, ironic paranoia.

Kein Systemvergleich means “comparison between systems is forbidden.”  It is written here in the imperative, as an order. I don’t want to sound shrill, but I have to say this once in a while to the people in my environment.  Sometimes I have to say it to myself:  No comparing the university system of Country X with the system of Country Y, for instance.  Sure you can do it among yourselves, but not in front of people from Country Y (the loser in this example).

If you think about it, clichés about farmers being simple and perhaps simple-minded cannot possibly have any basis in truth.  Have you ever tried to farm successfully (she asked rhetorically)?  I am not talking about agribusiness, I am speaking here of you and your family subsisting by farming your land. 

Something deep and bizarre is going on with the accusation of “passive aggressiveness.”   I hear all the time that an entire city of people or region of a country is “passive aggressive.”  Here is the pattern I am detecting: if you are new to a culture, a subculture, a region, and you are having trouble with the communication of expectations, things go awry.  And when they do?  You just go ahead and call your host culture “passive aggressive.”  That just about takes care of the whole problem right there. You asked and didn’t get.  Or you didn’t ask and weren’t told.  Or you wanted to ask, but didn’t know how, and no one helped you out.  Hell, they’re all passive aggressive.

Recently I took a person from Switzerland to Mickey’s Tavern on the east side of Madison (WI), because he had read about it in the New York Times.  We could have gone to about thirty other places for the food and the feeling he wanted to experience at Mickey’s.  The experience he sought was the eating of a succulent hamburger that was actually delivered to his table by a live human being.  He had believed that McDonalds makes “American hamburgers,” and it was time that he learned the truth.  I could also have taken him to the Blue Moon Bar and Grill in Madison.  Those are, after all, the words to look for when you want to get a great burger:  Tavern, Bar, Grill, Bar and Grill.  If those words are not there, you might appreciate what you are eating, but it isn’t a great burger. 

Psychorigidité is a French word that gets thrown around a lot in our house.  There is not a good English translation of it.  Still, the two word parts psycho and rigide, along with the fact that my French boys apply this label to their German father, should tip you off as to its meaning:Psychorigidité is some combination of “mentally rigid” and “obsessive,” and, as you probably know, it is a cliché that is indeed often directed at Germans.  The fact that I know a lot of Germans who I would call more hysterical than obsessive, and so did Freud, seems not to have counteracted the use of this cliché.

Recently there was an article in the Guardian, written by a self-identified “Italian-American” journalist who lives in Paris. Frankly terrible from a scientific standpoint, potentially unethical from a journalistic standpoint, the writer just interviews her friends about parenting practices, and observes anxious mothers hanging around in les Jardins du Luxembourg. 

Three things happened last weekend that made me think of how and when people help other people.  

After the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia hit rock and sank a couple of weeks ago, people all over the world listened to the recording (with subtitles if they did not speak Italian) of the Coast Guard captain yelling at the cruise ship’s captain, Schettino, to get back on board and be responsible. 

When I listen to jazz, I feel at my most American.

I looked up the word “cliché” to figure out where the word comes from, and whether it means what I think I am writing about: First, the origin: French, literally, printer's stereotype, from past participle of clicher to stereotype, of imitative origin. First Known Use: 1892

And now, the definition: Acliché (from French, klɪ'ʃe) is a phrase, expression, or idea that has been overused to the point of losing its intended force or novelty, especially when at some time it was considered distinctively forceful or novel. The term is generally used in a negative context.

As you already know, the United States Declaration of Independence, which was largely drafted by Thomas Jefferson and adopted on July 4, 1776, states the following:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certainunalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

When I was learning French, which unfortunately was concurrent with my teaching of Psychology courses in the French language at Université Blaise Pascal, in Central France, one of my colleagues set a language goal for me: “You should be able to speak French without letting on that you are actually American.” 

Well, there’s a goal.

Speaking of accents, which I was in the last post, I could never remember after the fact whether Monsieur Gauvin, who lived in a neighboring building and who was schizophrenic, spoke in French or English.

Hollywood has produced an evolution of images of the “reconstituted family” (that is a direct translation from French) over the decades. But, no existing movie or television series depicts the challenges that I faced in becoming a stepmother in France. My experience was a clash of clichés that has never appeared on screen, large or small.

Last summer while visiting friends at their family home in the Dordogne (France), I met an incredibly fabulous couple from Boston and their three little boys. In a wide-ranging conversation, the mother Susan mentioned the habitual state of … well, the state of their toilettes, as we would say in French (“bathroom” in American English, “loo” in British English).  Have you seen that slomo, easily found on YouTube, of what happens when a man pees in standing? 

Gross.

I mentioned back in my post “Smiles are the Tip of the Biggest Iceberg” that in my professional life as a university professor I conduct research on the human smile and how we understand its meanings. Carl Zimmer did a nice Science Times piece on a model that I developed with others that tries to describe the behaviors and brain processes that help us in these matters.  I was glad that he could make the work understandable.

Yesterday my 11 year-old son asked me to explain what Democrats versus Republicans believe when it comes to politics.  He wasn’t asking about policy per se, he was just wondering how one got to be called one label or the other.  

I appreciated his trust in me.