« Nous n’avons pas besoin de parler français, nous avons besoin du français pour parler » (André Belleau).
«It wouldn’t be much of a task to simply hit Dre over the head, take the cross, and disappear into the woods with Sophie, the cross, and my peace of mind.»
Dennis Lehane, Moonlight Mile. A Kenzie and Gennaro Novel, New York, Harper, 2011, 348 p., p. 283. Édition originale : 2010.
(Une définition du zeugme ? Par là.)
«The blond woman was Donna, I assumed. She was attractive the way sports bar hostesses and pharmaceutical reps are — hair the color of rum and lots of it, teeth as bright as Bermuda. She had the look of a woman who kept her plastic surgeon on speed dial. Her breasts were prominently displayed in most of the photos and looked like perfect softballs made of flesh. Her forehead was unlined in the way of the recently embalmed and her smile resembled that of someone undergoing electroshock.»
Dennis Lehane, Moonlight Mile. A Kenzie and Gennaro Novel, New York, Harper, 2011, 348 p., p. 132. Édition originale : 2010.
(«Le niveau baisse !» est une rubrique dans laquelle l’Oreille tendue collectionne les citations sur le déclin [supposé] de la langue. Les suggestions sont bienvenues.)
«After my daughter was born, I’d considered buying a shotgun to ward off potential suitors fourteen or so years up the road. Now, as I listened to these girls babble and imagined Gabby one day talking with the same banality and ignorance of the English language, I thought of buying the same shotgun to blow my own fucking head off.
Five thousand years of civilization, more or less, twenty-three hundred years since the libraries of Alexandria, over a hundred years since the invention of flight, wafer-thin computers at our fingertips, which can access the intellectual riches of the globe, and judging by the girls in that room, the only advance we’d made since the invention of fire was turning like into an omni-word, useful as a verb, a noun, an article, the whole sentence if need be» (p. 124).
Source : Dennis Lehane, Moonlight Mile. A Kenzie and Gennaro Novel, New York, Harper, 2011, 348 p. Édition originale : 2010.
Pour en savoir plus sur cette question :
Melançon, Benoît, Le niveau baisse ! (et autres idées reçues sur la langue), Montréal, Del Busso éditeur, 2015, 118 p. Ill.
«Thorson ne répondit pas. Ses assaillants chuchotaient sans qu’il parvienne à entendre ce qu’ils se disaient. Ils semblaient se disputer. Apparemment, ils n’étaient pas d’accord. Il avait beau tendre l’oreille, il ne distinguait pas ce qu’ils disaient.»
Arnaldur Indridason, la Femme de l’ombre. Trilogie des ombres, tome 2. Roman, Paris, Seuil, coll. «Points. Policier», P4832, 2018, 384 p., p. 186. Traduction d’Éric Boury. Édition originale : 2016.
«Lucas et Lapointe tendirent l’oreille, bien entendu, dès que commença l’enregistrement pris au Café des Amis.»
Georges Simenon, Maigret et le tueur, dans Tout Maigret. 9, Paris, Omnibus, 2019, p. 319-476, p. 361. Préfaces de Jean-Luc Bannalec. Notes de Michel Carly. Édition originale : 1969.