Hairline Cracks
It has never struck me that the people who cut my hair are failed comedians. Taxi-drivers quite possibly, but barbers and coiffeurs, no. What hairdressers do, essentially and apparently universally, is chat.
Cutting hair must be a fairly tedious and repetitive business, so perhaps they find relief in asking about where you are going/have been on holiday, telling you what was on TV last night or discussing the weather. (Contrary to common belief, the French talk about the weather at least as much as the British.) When I worked in Piccadillly, my hairdresser liked to boast of the stock market tips he received from his tycoon patrons, but he still fell back on the weather when he ran out of names to drop. But wit and humour seem to be beyond, or perhaps beneath, all these practitioners. So how is it that so many proprietors of hairdressing establishments are addicted to puns?
In Britain, the emphasis seems, as you might expect, to be on word-play around hair and cutting. Upper Cut and A Cut Above are both popular, as are Hair Waves, Hairodrome, and Haircraft. I even once Hair on a G String, which is rather tasteless when you think about it. There are doubtless innumerable other variants, but what they all have in common is a jokey attitude to putting a name to what is a serious business.
Having gritted my teeth at such tonsorial waggishness in the UK, I’m not sure why it should have come as a surprise to find the same tendency in France, but it did. In many ways the French sense of humour differs from the British variety, or perhaps I just credited the French with taking life more seriously. Whatever, hairdresser punning is alive and well in France, I’m sorry to say. Don’t get me wrong: I’m far from averse to puns, but there are clever puns and feeble ones and hairdressers, it appears, limit their horizons to the latter kind.
Sometimes they add a touch of what they probably see as sophistication by a kind of bilingual punning: Imagin’hair, Atmosp’Hair and, even, in Provence, Hemisp’Hair Sud. However, the favoured word to play with is the French for hair: tif or tifs. By far the most common, proving perhaps that great French hairdressing minds think alike, are Crea’tif and Mo’tifs. We also have Liber’tifs, which, while strictly meaningless, at least suggests freedom; the improbable Diminu’tifs (not so much off the top, please), Defini’tif (and the really awful Dauphini’tif), Absolut’tifs; and the more relevant Ac’tif, Revolu’tif and Evolu’tif.
Almost all, as you see, take the easy way out of substituting tif for the commonplace ‘-ive’ word-ending. Only one I have come across goes, as it were, to the other extreme: Tif’erence is both more imaginative and even, suggesting what all customers are secretly hoping for, relevant. By the standard of the genre, it is almost witty – though, alas, not quite.
In France, there is far less of a cult of personality than in Britain when it comes to hanging out a shingle. Butchers frequently announce themselves bluntly as boucher, bakers’ shops as boulangeries and, for all I know, chandlestick-makers as chandelleries. Only hairdressers agonise over the need to be distinc’tif (which would be better than most) – no doubt over every aperitif and digestif.
+ + + +
This article first appeared in the September 2006 issue of The Connexion, the newspaper for English-speakers in France. To order a free trial copy of The Connexion click here.
