I met a man whose English seemed unusually good for his background-- someone who had never finished lycée-- and asked how he learned it. "After I left school, I was a diver au fin fond de l'Angleterre," he said. [= in the depths of the provinces]
"A diver?" I said. "You mean like under the ocean?"
He laughed. "No, a plongeur means someone who washes dishes in a restaurant," he said. "That's where I learned all my English!"
"Well, you speak it pretty well," I said. "It must come in handy in Paris."
"It comes in handy sometimes, but not the way you think!" he said. "I was in a nightclub and I told all the girls I was American. They thought I was so cool because I spoke such good French! But then as we left with the girls, some friends of mine saw us and called out to us, 'Mais qu'est-ce que vous foutez ici?'* I wanted to kill them! The girls dumped us as soon as they figured out we weren't really American!"
*WTF are you doing here?
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