After English and Pig Latin, the next language I attempted to master was French. I was probably in my third year of it when my friend Shawn started hanging out with the French girls in our high school. Shawn was a year younger than me, which meant she needed me to drive her around to the parties. Or in this case, she needed me to drive her and three French girls to a party.
In the car, whatever we said was in English, and Shawn did most of the talking. Even though I knew some French, I was not really confident in attempting to use it in real life, and plus I am an introvert. I think some of the French girls were kind of introverted, too, or maybe just not very confident with their English.
Well, we got to the typical high school house party in middle class suburbia, thrown by and/or mostly populated with some dumb high school boys.
Dumb drunk guys + French girls = blog post...
Inside the house, we found a room where the five of us could sit. We were soon joined by one of the dumb drunk guys who sat, or fell down, in our vicinity. He discovered that the three girls were French, or more likely, he had heard it in another room and decided to come investigate.
“Cool, so like, you girls are French. Like from France. Wow. Cool.”
I think the French girls might have nodded politely.
“So like, say something in French,” slurred the American Ambassador of Charm.
Well, the French girls didn’t really know what to do with such an open invitation. Or maybe they just didn’t have anything to say to this dork. No one said anything for an awkward moment, until I chimed in.
“Tu pètes plus haut que ton cul,” I offered.
There was another odd moment of silence. Then one of the French girls snickered. Then she started giggling. And the other French girls started giggling, louder and louder as it hit them what I’d said.
Dumb Guy was all, “What? What’d she say? What’d she say?” which just made the French girls giggle more.
Eventually, Dumb Guy gave up and went away, frustrated.
Shawn leaned over and asked, “Ok, what DID you say?”
“You fart higher than your ass,” I answered.
That $5 book of French slang was totally worth it.
Here's the flip side of this approach: The freshmen at the German club of SHS kept bothering me for the German translations of English slang terms. Eventually I got tired of actually teaching them anything and mapped all their word requests to hair care products. Which had the nice effect of all of them running around one afternoon calling each other hair brushes in German.
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