The importance of apprivoiser, Candidely late

That trite expression, youth is wasted on the young, has a grain of truth. For example, there are many supposedly children’s books that are only fully appreciated long after adolescence.

To demonstrate, as part of my Advanced Placement French program in high school, I read Saint-Exupéry’s famous The Little Prince in the original French. While I was somewhat aware of the existence of its more profound points, I concentrated on the charming story as have millions of readers.

However, recently I remembered a certain incident, more specifically a word, from the text, namely apprivoiser.  The dictionary translates the word as to domesticate, win over or tame, the latter appearing in the English translation. In the context of the story, the word is applied in regards to the friendship with the fox (chapter XXI), the value of friendship and its price.

Alas, I would strongly disagree with the translation of the word into “tame” both in terms of linguistics and emotional intelligence. The fox does not become compliant as a tame animal would. Instead, it is won over, like a cat, free to act but choosing to create a tie.  I would consider translating apprivoiser as “to make special” even it does not fit the literary style of the book because it better expresses the concept of the word.  Moreover, my divorce, subsequent second marriage and wild voyage with my daughter has taught me the importance, even essentialness, of apprivoiser.  To have a strong social structure, you must make the people important to you feel special by investing time in them. Like the fox said to the Little Prince, go back to your rose. All roses may be created equal but we can and should choose to make certain roses special, whether they are plants or people. The price may be occasional tears but you gain, as the fox says.

So, now, several decades later, I finally understood the morale stated in that chapter: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Or as Voltaire wrote at the end of another deceivingly simple tale, Candide, “il faut cultiver son jardin” (let us cultivate our garden).

Executive order

Words can sound good or bad not just in the sense of their auditory quality but also in their associational impact. By the latter I mean the emotional feeling created by that word, or at least one meaning of the word.  Of course, most words are neutral in themselves but life experiences shade the word. For example, a book is stack of papers bound together but a person’s experience may make render the association either positive, a wonderful tranquil experience, or negative, the objects that made my life at school miserable.  In some cases, even without first experience, the mere picturing of the word creates negative impressions. For instance, almost none of us have witnessed an amputation but the image of saw and lots of blood makes the process rather scary and unpleasant.

An interesting example of the associational complexity is the word execute.  For the average person, this word brings up the image of person standing against the wall or sitting in an electric chair, reinforced by repeated images in movies and TV documentaries (Woody Allen’s Love and Death and The Green Mile immediately come to mind). Even the most unsophisticated understand that execution is a once in a lifetime experience of a particularly bad type. Thus, execution has gotten itself a bad name.

Law has reinforced this attitude, at least for some people.  To execute a judgment means to carry it out, as in placing a lien on a bank account or repossessing a car or house.  For the recipient, it is clearly a traumatic experience even if not entirely unexpected at the time. Combined with the word’s first context, execution of a court order sounds like a death sentence.  For that reason, in England and the United States but not France, it is called enforcement. As Hannah Arendt explained in With Eichmann in Jerusalem, it was psychologically much easier to carry out the final settlement than murder.

Curiously, if the context is clear enough and other words are added, execution becomes much more palatable: Sports teams must execute the coach’s plan to succeed; it is the job of the President to execute the law; all persons are entitled to execute their right of attorney.  Most people do not grimace when hearing such phrases since death is far from their thoughts when hearing them.

So, alas, a rose is not always a rose; sometimes it is a thorn bush either due to a bee sting or possibly an allergy to roses. The why of our emotional associations to words is complex but nobody can deny their existence.