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The Dinner-Table Debate
In France, a lively disagreement over dinner is often a sign that the evening is going well. Friends argue about politics, food, films, education and the French language itself, interrupt one another, raise their voices and end the evening on good terms. Visitors from cultures where open disagreement at a meal is avoided sometimes mistake this for real conflict; for many French people, a dinner without debate is a dull one. The conventions are not a free-for-all, though. Interruptions are frequent, but so are the phrases that manage them, such as laisse-moi finir, j'y viens or je me permets de te couper, and speakers are expected to concede points gracefully when they lose them. Claims are often hedged with que je sache or à ce que je sache, which can sound either modest or pointed, depending on the tone. Whether to correct a learner's French is itself a classic subject. Language teachers often recommend recasting: repeating the learner's sentence correctly in your answer without drawing attention to the error. It corrects without embarrassing, and it respects the difference between a learner's mistake and a speaker of another variety of French, such as a Québécois saying présentement.