Taken to Task Over a Little Difference

My distinguished colleague Frederick S. Holley, author of The Times Stylebook and this newspaper’s guardian of usage, has chastised me for clumsily paraphrasing a well-known remark. (Several readers have made the same complaint.)

“I am writing to protest,” he writes, “your quotation of the French line: ‘Thank God for that little difference.’ The French phrase is: Vive la difference! which translates as ‘Long live the difference!’

“The story is that in the French Chamber of Deputies, a legislator was speaking on behalf of women’s suffrage or some such issue and pointed out, ‘There is after all only a little difference between man and woman.’ To which a fellow deputy shouted in reply: ‘ Vive la difference! ‘ “

Holley is quite right. The anecdote is undoubtedly apocryphal, but it has so much value in the reconciliation of the sexes, that I choose to believe it was spoken exactly in the circumstances recalled by him and exactly in the form he uses.

However, the anecdote itself may be paraphrased from Rousseau’s remark, “Regard it as you will, the difference is only in degree.” Of course, Rousseau said that in French, but it comes down to us in the English translation. I would not attempt to re-create the original French.

In explaining the palindrome once to my French daughter-in-law, I recalled the famous one attributed to Napoleon: “Able was I ere I saw Elba.”

She said: “But Napoleon, he would not have say that.” She explained that the palindrome was English, and Napoleon was not likely to have used the language of his enemy. I asked her what Napoleon would have said.

She said, “Je pouvais toute faire, avant d’avoir vu Elbe.”

We have the same problem with Vive la difference! Americans simply do not say “vive” when they mean “hooray for” or “thank God for” or “long live!” It is like hearing “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose,” instead of “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” One is impressed, but one is not informed.

By the way, the final line of that old classic, “Adam’s Rib,” illustrates my point. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn are man and wife; he’s an assistant district attorney; she’s a lawyer. He is obliged to prosecute Judy Holliday, who has followed her faithless husband to a love nest and shot but not killed him; Hepburn takes her defense. In the trial there is a lot of sexual combat involving the “unwritten law” and women’s rights; outraged, Tracy leaves home. In the inevitable reconciliation, she says:

“There’s no difference between the sexes. Men, women. The same. Well maybe there is a difference, but it’s a little difference.”

He says: “You know what the French say, ‘Vive la difference!’ “

Hepburn says: “Meaning what?”

He says: “Hooray for that little difference!”

Whereupon, he encloses them behind the bed curtain, and the movie ends. One is left with little doubt that they are about to celebrate that little difference.

I have also been chastised by several readers for writing, in reference to Ginger Rogers’ role as Susu Applegate in “The Major and the Minor”: “I suspect that audiences didn’t buy Ginger as a 12-year-old, knowing that beneath that middy beat the breast of a sexually mature woman.”

Julian Bud Lester writes that he was so amused by what he calls my “glitch” that he sent it to the New Yorker for their Newsbreaks department--those embarrassing boo-boos from the nation’s press that appear at the bottom of the magazine’s pages with suitable comment.

In 35 years at The Times I have made that department only once. That was a paragraph of mine clipped from the San Francisco Chronicle from which a line had been cut, making it sound ridiculous. I wrote William Shawn, the New Yorker’s distinguished editor, explaining that it wasn’t my fault.

He replied: “Thank you for letting me know what happened at the San Francisco Chronicle. It can happen anywhere. Here, too. Anyway, you are innocent.”

I am not innocent of referring to Ginger Rogers’ beating breast. However, Lester writes again to say that the New Yorker rejected his contribution with this hand-written note: “Alas. We decided the humor was intentional. Do try again.”

Alas, can it be that Lester has never felt a woman’s beating breast?