Hello again!

In the biography of Churchill, I've found a note with an obscure meaning to me.

The "Total War" with Germany has already begun, with France being invaded after Holland and Belgium. Churchill has just flown to Paris to "hold the hand" of Paul Reynaud, France's premier at the moment, and finds the male personnel of the British Embassy burning archives and female staff being evacuated to Le Havre.

There the author of the book adds this note: "Which Churchill pronounced to rhyme with ‘carver’".  

I cannot see the point of this rhyme (?). Does that mean that Churchill understood Le Havre as a knife to carve the German "birds" —eg, the Stukas—? The remark is perhaps self-evident to a British mind, because there's no explanation whatsoever of the implications of that particular way of pronouncing the word —assuming there's one. But I would like to make sure it's not just a note about the special diction of Churchill, with his known way of saying "nazis" ("Narzees"), for example, or his lisping.



That's perhaps too much asking from me, but I am curious to know the reason for that "carver".



Thanks for your help and light once again.


CM

He didn't mean anything very clever by it, I reckon - he had a habit of intentionally pronouncing certain words in his own way, most notably "Nazi" where he eschewed the German "ts" inflection and stuck doggedly to the English "Zzzzz" inflection throughout his life.

In the case of "Le Harver" he was either consciously affecting a common English mispronunciation (of which Le Havre being a harbour was probably the root for people uncomfortable with adopting French accents or learning the language), or unconsciously part of that peculiarly British mild xenophobia which - as with "Wipers" for "Ypres" during WWI - simply refused to afford these places their correct pronunciation. "Le Harver" in fact was also a common pronunciation of the port with British soldiers during that war, which is how he also probably acquired the habit.

I see. That was just, then, a rather trivial and nice, say jocular, way of talking as the one may find usually between two neighbouring countries, I gather. As, probably, between Portugal and Spain or Spain and Italy, for example. 

Sometimes, when translating, I tend to see tricks and traps everywhere —first sign of holydays being badly needed, I suppose.

Thank you, Nordmann. :-)

Well, I'm not sure if the French see it quite that way when the English intentionally mispronounce their words by substituting an English word almost but not quite the same.

As "jocular" goes, the joke wears a bit thin after the first ten thousand times it's employed, I reckon.

But then, irritating the French is probably the whole point of the "jocularity", in as much as English xenophobes have a sense of humour ...

Churchill really had no excuse for not speaking with a good French accent as both his mother (Jennie Jerome) and his wife (Clementine Hozier), were fluent French speakers, his mother having lived in France for several years and his wife having had a French governess and then a native French tutor. And yet De Gaulle once said that it was only by his learning English that he was able to understand Churchill's French. Actually I think Churchill's conversational French was fairly competent but it was his accent, pronunciation and his strange 'Churchillian' phrases rendered into French, that tended to let him down. He did of course also suffer from a mild stammer.