French Kissing
It’s not that Americans scorn the French, we love the French, where would kissing be without them? It’s just that when Pee Wee Bush was trying to get us to turn on them for not supporting his Big Adventure in Iraq he tapped into one of our deepest inferiority complexes: we’re all pretty sure we sound like fools when we try to speak their language.Dave and I speak French with a Boston accent, as we found out when we went to Paris once. Me I thought I was so great in languages in high school (“98 for the year in Latin, 96 in French!” I’d boast to my few (and where's the surprise there?) friends but when I GOT OVER TO PARIS I could only speak the language in a way that made them fall over laughing: “A thousand pardons is it that I might purchases some of these purchases why not because?" And, “Excuse me if you please step on your foot could tell me perhaps how many monies these object are costing?” - And then when they answered - after they finally stopped howling - I could not understand a single word.Lucky for us, Old Dave, who would speak French with a Boston accent if he’d agree to so much as open his mouth and try, saved the day because he seems to be set on ‘receive; where I am set on ‘transmit’. He understood everything they said the whole week and conveyed it all to me, so I could try composing my next baroque utterance.We had a great time anyway, mostly because in Paris all they do is sit in cafés drinking the good coffee in the morning and the good red wine at night while smoking cigarettes and laughing at Death and there sure as hell is none o' that timidity and guilt we have here in Les États-Unis I can tell you.Sigh. Now I want to go back - brush up on the vocab and see if the strengthening dollar I read about in today’s paper might permit another trip sometime down the line.'Pamplemousse’ means ‘grapefruit’, I know that, and ‘douche’ means nothing more than ‘shower’ and it makes me furious every time I think how it got twisted into some nasty slangy insult here. And as for ‘Nescafé’ that means ‘I never-did-learn-to-make-coffee-so-here’s a fake-French-word-to-go-with-your-instant, BABE.’
