Pardon My French

Like most families, we frequently discuss our solar system over dinner. It was Earth Day and my son, Colin, was asking about the color of various planets. Earth is blue and Saturn and Mars are red. With utter innocence, Colin then inquired, "what color is Uranus, Daddy?" After SJ and I managed to not spit out our food, we did our best to answer him with a straight face.

Learning a language is a tricky thing. I don't remember the inadvertent double entendres and mistakes I made when I learned English, but I know that I made plenty of erreurs when learning French.

French is a complicated language. It's rather straightforward grammatically, but the French use five misleading letters to spell each sound; there's only one syllable in "peaux," for example, and though it rhymes with "slow," they use almost every letter except "o" to do the job.

Learning French can be a thankless and solitary endeavor. French people love their language, and they don't care to hear it spoken by amateurs. Even after I earned a college degree in French, French people with even a rudimentary knowledge of English answered in my mother tongue.

Adding to the challenge are the faux amis, or "false friends," words that look misleadingly like the words you are looking for but mean something else entirely.

For example, my first post-college job was at a French-speaking office. I wasn't feeling well one day and announced to my colleagues that I was sick and going to see the company nurse. At least that was my intention. In actual fact I chose the wrong word for "nurse" (infirmiere) and told everyone I was going to see the wet nurse (nourrice.). Although breastfeeding might have been comforting in my situation, it wasn't what I meant to say and they didn't have a wet nurse on staff anyway. Happily for my co-workers, although I was mortified, they were in stitches for the rest of the day.

It happens to the best of us. My high-school French teacher complained to a Frenchman about preservatives in American cereal. The Frenchman grinned and told her "Oh, Madame, you Americans are so practical!" before explaining that the word preservatif means "condom" in French.

Learning French is even more difficult when you are an idiot, like my high school boyfriend. OK, maybe he just didn't pay attention in French class, but I don't think so. As an exchange student he tried to tell his family that he was a bit hungry, saying "Je suis un petit faim." Sadly, in bad French with a bad accent he had announced that he was a small woman.

Boyfriend also tried make suggestions and then ask "Sounds good?" He did this by saying "Ecoute bien?" which actually a command meaning "listen up!" This was confusing both in the fact that he was admonishing his befuddled host family at the end of every proposal, and that he was doing it with a question mark. "Let's go on a hike. Listen...up?"

For me, Francophilia has been a torrid but mostly one-sided love affair. I was a willing participant; what could be more seductive to a young girl than the promise of Paris, berets, and baguettes?

France and I had our moments of passion: my summer as a Parisian waitress, French being my only marketable skill when I graduated, and dropping the odd arcane and pretentious French reference (J'accuse!) from time to time. I also met my husband while working on AOL France 3.0.

Still, despite years of effort I know that French will never quite belong to me. I've literally given it the college try, and am content with being pretty good rather than parfait.

At least, to my knowledge, I've never accidentally inquired about anyone's anus.