None gave a completely convincing explanation

None gave a completely convincing explanation.They suggested that it might be something to do with the nature of the French language itself, which is more rigid than English. They are often yoked together to end sentences with a monotonous “voil?uoi” (just as the word “yeah?” now ritually ends English sentences). Thus, Winston Churchill, if young and alive today, would say: “We will fight them on the beaches, yeah?” General de Gaulle, if he was a young Frenchman alive today, would say “Vive le Qu?c libre, voil?uoi.”All the same, spoken French has not (yet) reached the level of the disintegration of spoken English. The words “voil?(there you are) and “quoi” (what) litter the conversation of young French people.

Between themselves, they spoke in the bizarre word-reversing slang (verlan), which is the lingua franca of the suburbs but, for my sake, they were able to switch easily to standard, grammatical French.France is not immune to the kind of verbal viruses that afflict the speech of young people in Britain. I would like to apologise once again for inconveniencing you, but to ask you, each one of you, to spare what little you may have to help me. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.”All of this sounded much better in the original French. I gave him a couple of euros (I thought his fine oratory merited some reward), but I was the only person in the carriage who did.My question is not, “why are the French so mean?”, but, “why are the French so articulate?”.Britain has recently been told that it has raised a generation of young people who communicate with grunts and incoherent bundles of clich? Why is it that even French down-and-outs, even French footballers, speak so grammatically and so fluently?During the 1998 World Cup in France, I interviewed a number of celebrated French footballers – Marcel Desailly, Emmanuel Petit, Lilian Thuram, even, briefly, Zinedine Zidane – and was struck by how thoughtfully and coherently they spoke. I am, I know, not the first to address you in this way, and I will, unfortunately, not be the last. I would like to say, however, that, despite what many of you may think, it is not through laziness that I come before you.”It is not easy, for me at any rate, to have to solicit money from you in this way. The other day, somewhere between Gambetta and R?blique, a neatly turned-out but depressed-looking man in his mid-forties suddenly made, roughly, the following speech:
“Good day, ladies and gentlemen.

While travelling on the M?o, it is common for one of your fellow-passengers to launch into an elaborately constructed soliloquy. One of the curiosities of Paris is the eloquence of its beggars. It will involve pulling together and trying, as faith groups together, to get people to volunteer for inter-faith activity which will be for the benefit of the wider society.I think we are on the cusp and I think it is going to be very difficult. But, if volunteering by faith means anything, my view is that it has to mean volunteering for the sake of all our faiths, and not just the one..