Friends of words, we continue our tour of France of spelling mistakes; now, it’s the listeners who point them out to me! This is what Marianne, from Lyon, did, where regulars in the Part-Dieu district were surprised to see advertising posters full of mistakes appear. Two huge mistakes in 60 characters.
I say it often, making mistakes is normal, not making any at all is impossible. And I am frankly tolerant of everyone’s daily mistakes. But when you have your prose printed in dozens of copies to display it widely and in public, you at least take the trouble to open your dictionary, name of a Little Robert!
The slogan displayed everywhere on the walls of the Lyon station and metro to promote a dating site was “Paris managed to have five rings and you don’t even have one? Find your other half!”.Three “a” sounds, two errors. All posters were immediately removed and reprinted. So spelling, yes, it can have a real cost. Once again, hiring the services of a professional proofreader would have been more economical. Not to mention that there is a simple trick to avoid confusing “a” without accent and “à” with accent…
Remembering elementary school…
Let us recall to begin with that the “a” without accent, it is one of the many forms of the verb avoir (he has a coffee, she has a croissant, we are hungry), while the “à” with accent, it’s a preposition. The big difference between the two, the one that suits us well, in this case, is that the preposition is invariable, while the verb avoir has many different forms.
Hence the elementary school trick to distinguish them from each other: if we can replace our “a” with “had” or “aura”, or any other form, well it’s the verb avoir, naturally… so “a” without accent ! So. If we can’t, it’s the preposition, so “à” with accent.
We try ? “Paris managed to have five rings and you don’t even have one?”, if we put all our “a”s in the future, it gives “Paris will have succeeded in having five rings and you won’t even have one”, in short, there are two that work: “Paris will have succeeded” and “you won’t even have one”, so these two are “a” without an accent. On the other hand, “Paris aura avoir” is niet, so in this case, “à” accent. Childish.
But it wasn’t just the accent error on this poster… Oh no. The “as” in ‘You don’t even have one’, the verb to have, eh (I have, you have, he has). When do we learn that? In CP! Well “you have” was written without S . My arms are falling, and in fact the arms of the Lyonnais have fallen. My advice on conjugation? If you have the slightest doubt, take a look at Larousse.fr or Dictionnaire.lerobert.fr, all the verbs are there!
Read more
