Ouch!
Did you almost feel physical pain?
Perhaps someone said something rude. Perhaps an uncomfortable memory surfaced. Something that still smarts, even now.
We have travelled from feeling rather good about ourselves to something that almost hurts using exactly the same five letters.
And we understood every step.
Nobody needed to explain that to be smart and to smart were taking us to entirely different places. The words around smart were enough. So were our experiences. Our bodies seemed to know what was happening before we had time to think about it.
This is what fascinates me about spending a month with one French word. It demonstrates how much your brain is already capable of understanding in French.
You may already know pouvoir as can. That is often how it first arrives. An English word is attached to it and, for a while, the two seem to belong together.
But a word becomes much more interesting when we stop asking for its translation and give it time to show us what it can do.
Across August, pouvoir will appear in 12 Rendez-Vous Tutos, three each week. It will keep returning, but the situation around it will change.
The person speaking will change. Their intention will change.
And the sensation created by the word will change.
Sometimes pouvoir opens something up. Sometimes it leaves something uncertain. Sometimes another person holds the answer. Sometimes you reach je n'en peux plus and can almost feel the weight of the day in your body. In English you might say you can't take any more. In French, the day has simply used up your pouvoir.
Then there is le pouvoir, which takes us somewhere else again. With le in front of it, the word stops being something you do and becomes something you hold: power, authority, influence. These aren't simply more translations to add to a list. They are different experiences of the same word.
Each time pouvoir reappears, something new attaches itself to it: a voice, a situation, a feeling, perhaps a memory of when you heard it before.
The connections build.
By the end of the month, pouvoir may still be the same collection of letters, but it will no longer feel like a single French word attached to a single English one. It will have begun to acquire a life of its own.
Only now, looking back, do we need to label what happened at the beginning.
In to be smart, smart was an adjective linked to the verb to be. The closest French equivalent is intelligent(e), the word for someone whose judgement you admire. (Elle est intelligente.)
French also gives you malin/maligne, which carries a hint of cleverness, of spotting the angle before anyone else. (Je suis malin. Je suis maligne.)
In a smart price, a smart decision and a smart move, the same adjective sat before a noun.
(Un prix malin)
A smart place could shift the meaning again.
(Un resto chic.)
In to smart, it became a verb and produced an entirely different physical reaction.
(Être piqué au vif: la remarque m’a piquée au vif.)
You knew all of that without knowing that you knew it.
Perhaps pouvoir simply needs enough time to reveal all the different ways it can make itself felt.
Pouvoir is waiting for you the app. It is the easiest way to follow the word this month.
