Becoming Parisian, It's Easy...?

I had a drink with an American friend who loves to make these great vlogs (video blogs) and recently did one about the top 10 reasons that she'll never be Parisian and the top 10 ways in which she HAS become Parisian.

It's very Anglophone to have lists like these. My Dutch and Italian friends, for example, are UNABLE to name their top 5 breakup songs of all-time, if you can imagine. It is no coincidence that the author of High Fidelity (featuring about 5 million lists of this kind) is British.

Among the reasons in favor of Parisianess was that she now uses non-verbal communication. I must confess that I do, too. To express disdain, frustration or annoyance, the French (and some expats, too) just sigh dramatically. They huff and puff in annoyance. This sigh is even transcribed verbally in books, text messages and IM chats as "Pfft."

I've also noticed that when I visit my family in the American university town where they live, I am horrified on a daily basis by American college students who wear baggy sweatshirts, sweatpants and running shoes on a daily basis. To me, it looks like they're wearing their pajamas. In Europe, people only wear sweatpants when they're exercising. Which they don't do in public, but only in small, overpriced gyms or city parks.

For me, I think one of my most French habits, besides sighing and a physical aversion to baggy sweatsuits, is the use of terrible sentence structure in English. In French, you often introduce a noun or idea and then subsequently make a comment on it using the pronoun "it" with an understood antecedent. For example, "the snow, it's pretty." This is pure French ("la neige, c'est beau."). Obviously, in English, we would say, "the snow is pretty," as normal sentence structure is subject, verb, object.

Or as the French would phrase it: normal sentence structure, it's subject, verb, object.

But normal, what is it?