French Gestures — and Not The One You’re Thinking

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Carolyn Vargo from Milwaukee, and I just wanted to tell you about my grandchildren and some ways they like to tease their grandpa and their grandpa likes to tease them.

What they do is they do all kinds of teasing, but I’ve given them some ammunition.

And one of the things I gave them were some gestures that they can use with Grandpa.

They come from a book called Beaux Gestes, a Guide to French Body Language by Lawrence Wiley and Rick Stafford.

One of the gestures that is most useful to them is called Mon Oye, which means my eye in French.

And it means, my eye, you can’t fool me.

And they pointed their finger to their eye, and that’s their way of saying, Grandpa, really.

Right.

They expressed his doubt or even a refusal to acknowledge anything that he said.

Often you’ll see the French people, they’ll pull down the lower eyelid so that the socket is exposed.

They’ll go, mon oi.

So that’s the most useful one that they’ve got.

Are there other – I’m not sure how much you want to know about the other gestures that are in the book.

Let’s hear one more.

Yeah, give us another one.

Okay.

So if you do marmo, which means silly or funny, and you act like a monkey, that’s another one that they can use.

And it just means you think you’re really funny, Grandpa.

That’s good.

Oh, but you’re not, huh?

And these are all from this book.

And do you have any French heritage, or you just found it amusing so you decided to use it?

No, I just took French in college.

And so that’s where I got this book.

And as I traveled to France and things, I saw a lot of really interesting conversations going on in the subways and stuff.

But those you wouldn’t teach to your grandchildren, but they had two people would be singling to each other across the tracks and that kind of thing.

But yeah, and so this book is really helpful.

You have to be a little bit careful because there’s some things that if you’re not part of the culture, you might not get.

Yeah, context is everything.

So you have to be careful.

Thank you so much for sharing that with us and your story about amusing your grandkids and your father with this book.

And call us again sometime, all right?

Thank you. Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Bye-bye.

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