Exactly one month before I was born (OK, you can do the math!), Charles de Gaulle proclaimed, "Je vous ai compris!" to a crowd in Algiers.
What, exactly, he understood--or whom he was trying to reassure that he understood--is not clear. Was he trying to reassure les pieds noirs--French colonials who lived (and some of whom were born) in Algeria that they could stay? Was he telling military personnel--French? Algerian? French Foreign Legion?--that he had their backs? Or was he guaranteeing Algerians that their country would become independent (as it did four years later)?
Some would say that he meant all, or none, of those things--that, perhaps, "je vous ai compris" was a "weasel" phrase.
If the latter is true, then the phrase could also be interpreted, if not translated, as "I have taken it under consideration" or "I have considered what you've said."
I have spent enough time around academic administrators to know that, for them and other bureaucrats, "consider" is too often a synonym for "ignore" or "pretend to hear."
What brought those locutions to mind is the recent law requiring New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority--which includes New York City's subway and bus systems, the region's commuter railroads and some of its bridges and tunnels--to "consider" bicycle and pedestrian access in its capital plans. Those plans would include not only new infrastructure, but also improvements to existing structures that currently lack such access.
Call me cynical (Hey, I'm a New Yorker!), but I have to wonder just what "consider" means. Or, for that matter, "access." Some of the "access" I've seen to bridges is "access" in the same way that the stuff McDonald's and Burger King serve is "food."
And, if the MTA actually does "consider" bike and pedestrian access, I have to wonder if it will be as poorly-conceived, -constructed and -maintained as most of the bike lanes I've seen in this city.
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