NPR Guest on Cultural "Engrams"

NPR today on Talk of the Nation or Day to Day had a very interesting French psychiatrist who has written a book on Cultural Differences, whose name I forget. His French name was mangled by a pretentious female interviewer trying to get him into supporting feminist tropes. However, this Doc pointed out that the French, among many other differences, have a female gender for the moon, male for the sun. He pointed to the exact opposite for the Germans, who have Der Mund for the moon and Die Sonne for the sun. He then extrapolated the implications: The French see men as "shining" and "productive," the Germans see women as radiant and the basis for society, men as up and down. He quoted Churchill on the Germans as: "either at your throat or on their knees."

Strangely, two other languages with the female gender for the sun are Arabic and Japanese [I am told or read somewhere]. Qamar is the male noun for moon in Arabic, and the female Shams [also the name of Damascus] is said by Arabs to be male because the sun robs people of strength. Note that the crescent [female] moon is on almost every Arab flag and that the Israelis say Arabs can be either the most loyal of friends [the Bedu in the desert] or the most bloodthirsty enemy [the Haadar in the city].

The Japanese culture [The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, by Ruth Benedict] also demonstrates this strange dichotomy/bipolar intensity.

The French prof ended his interview by chiding the French for their 35-hour week and their "museum-culture" complacency. To the point of laughing at Parisians for their beautiful city, "since not one of those living there today did anything to construct the wonderful buildings therein."

If I can find the books name on Slate, which has an NPR site, I will [oops, the npr.org site appears opaque, like all govt websites, and I will find later and update on name of book and author].