Wikipedia's national flavors - French

Epistemic status: Almost completely idiosyncratic Reading in different languages feels quite different, and Wikipedia makes this especially salient.[1] But I find it hard to articulate what these "national flavors" are, let alone communicate them. They become clearest in their characteristic failure modes:[2] German-flavored failure has to do with being so accurate that nothing is said. Spanish-flavored failure involves imitating French erudition and sounding like a fanboy. Oddly, Standard English doesn't have a distinct flavor for me, despite my not being a native speaker.[3] I think I have a lead on the French flavor, and this post is a first attempt to characterize it.[4]Starting point: French has an expression with no literal equivalent in the languages I know: "il s'écoute parler", literally: "he listen to himself while talking (to others)". Languages often have semantically idiosyncratic but functionally equivalent structures, so I initially assumed this was just an idiom for something like "he is presumptuous" or "he's a poseur". I now think it points to something distinctively French.[5]I recently came across a text that, for me, encapsulates the essence of listening to oneself. The rest of the post is a discussion of that text.Grothendieck is arguably the most brilliant mathematician of the 20th century. In the passage below, he is making a very deep point about algebraic geometry and expressing it through two very beautiful metaphors. He is sure to have the audience's full attention, and he could limit himself to rewarding that attention with truth and beauty. But he doesn't, and next to the deep truth and beauty he adds some French-flavored listening-to-oneself:“Je pourrais illustrer la ... approche, en gardant l’image de la noix qu’il s’agit d’ouvrir. La première parabole qui m’est venue à l’esprit tantôt, c’est qu’on plonge la noix dans un liquide émollient, de l’eau simplement pourquoi pas, de temps en temps on frotte pour qu’elle pénètre mieux, pour le