French Tease
By Mollie Coyne

Pardon My French!
Before we moved here, I spoke no French. In an effort to teach me, Andy would give me
dictations. I had never heard of a
dictation before. Apparently the dictée
is a common feature of French education.
I didn't see the point. You
don't learn English this way. You don't
learn Spanish this way. Why learn
French this way? Andy told me that
French is a very particular language and each word has just one way that it can
be pronounced. There are no
variations. If you slightly
mispronounce one word, you're actually saying another word altogether and you
won't make any sense. Not so much in English: you say
tomayto. I say tomahto. But we're both picturing a big, red
vegetable. Or fruit.
I once slightly mispronounced the French word for "when"
in a conversation with my landlord and his face turned beet red. I'm not going to explain this to those of
you who don't know what I'm talking about.
So Andy and I would do our dictées and now I have a very
good handle on pronunciation. Or so I
thought.
A
few years ago, I took the RER C train into Paris to see Lance kick-off his
number 4 at a time trial under the Tower.
On the train, I helped some Indian tourists figure out which stop was
closest to their hotel. At one point,
the man calmly told me that a teenage boy had his hand in my bag. My bag contained my passport, a huge wad of
dollars (worth something back then) that I owed a friend for exchanging euros,
my Nikon N90s, my Nikon FM2n and several lenses.
Maybe
it was the pregnancy hormones or maybe I was channeling some Lanceness, but he
was not getting away with this. We had
just moved here and I spoke very little French. I pulled his hand out of my bag and started yelling at him in
English. Within seconds, two of his
"colleagues" emerged from different ends of the train car to offer him
backup. I found myself facing three
teenage hoodlums. Angry teenage hoodlums, no less.
The
Indian tourist said, "Oh, I read about this in our guidebook-they always mug in
groups of three on the trains. How
interesting." How interesting,
indeed. He could have told me this
before I started yelling!
Three
versus me.
I
decided to keep up my soliloquy, worried that if I stopped I might give them
time to think and act. I needed to keep
up the tempo until we pulled into the next stop, so I went into a completely
nonsensical rant. I looked like a
full-throttle psycho patient, on speed.
The
three robbers were dazed and confused and started backing towards the door as I
walked towards them yapping. At the
next stop, when the doors opened, they ran out.
It
was high time to learn how to properly tell someone off in French.
I
asked friends for assistance, but the strongest I got was laissez-moi
tranquille. Ooh, what does that
mean? It means "leave me alone".
Big
deal.
I
tell Andy to leave me alone all the time.
Why
exactly do we call it "French" (as in "pardon my French") if they don't even
have any of it in this language?
And
then last Saturday morning in the doctor's office I finally learned some. We were in the waiting room where there's a
small Ikea children's table in the middle with little cups for markers and a
small stack of pirated Disney and DreamWorks coloring sheets that the
receptionist printed off the Internet.
When
it was time to go the kids couldn't be pulled away from their coloring. Since it was a Saturday morning, the waiting
room was full of families with parents watching and, I assume, judging my
parenting skills. I could tell a battle
was going to ensue.
Three
versus me. Again.
I
stood up to tell the kids we have to go.
Being surrounded by local families, I didn't want to embarrass the kids
by being Foreign Mom, so I spoke French.
I think we all know this was probably a bad idea. I wanted to tell them they could bring their
coloring sheets with them and finish by using the markers we have at home.
"Venez",
I said, clapping my hands to get their attention. "Nous avons plein de feutres chez nous."
Only
I didn't pronounce it properly. I
didn't say feutres. I said
foutres.
Oops. Turns out the f-word in English is also an
f-word in French. And I had just yelled
it at my kids in public. And completely
out of context, like the Foreign Mom I am.
While they look similar and even sound similar to Anglo
ears, they sound worlds apart to French ears and when I said it, most of them,
along with eyebrows, perked up. I was
oblivious.
Andy
immediately clued me in. I was
embarrassed, but then realized two things.
First of all, my kids did not react, so they were just as clueless as I
was and so no harm done to anyone in my family and second, I just
learned my first French French word!
It
took four years, eleven months and two weeks for the mothership to land and now
I know the f-word. Maybe one day my
kids can teach me some others.
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